Kachakâach

The Bloody Butcher of Wall St and the Bull

2012-03-01T06:34:00.000-08:00

On February 27, Occupy had a National Day of Action – Occupy Our Food Supply – to protest growing corporate control of the world’s food. The action in New York City included a march, a seed exchange, street performance, and guerilla planting. I’d like to focus solely on the performance, which I’m calling “The Bloody Butcher of Wall Street and the Bull,” for the purposes of this blog.

Pure agit-prop, “The Bloody Butcher” relied on pure symbolism and didactic dialogue. The symbolism rested in the characters and the three places where the play was performed: Liberty Square, in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and in front of the bronze Wall Street Bull. The symbolism of the Butcher figure and the NYSE were clear – they represented the malevolent influence of Wall Street on us the 99%. Liberty Square is the symbolic home and birthplace of the Movement that counters this influence. The Bull, however, has taken on a new complexity of symbolism. It has been used by the Movement since before the beginning in its role as the symbol of Wall Street, but now it is also used to represent stock animals in reference to the way they are abused by agribusiness.

You can watch the day's proceedings at http://www.lenk.tv/. This particular performance is saved in the Lenk-Atlantic channel at the end of "1-Occupy Our Food Supply" and the beginning of "2-Occupy Our Food Supply".

Hurt Village

2012-02-26T05:13:00.000-08:00

One of my major frustrations with the dominate culture is the way it lumps all ethnic minorities into one simple category. While the Greeks had their barbarians, and the Jews their Gentiles, white America has its People of Color.

That said, Katori Hall’s depiction of the social disintegration in the Hurt Village district of Memphis in her play of the same name was uncomfortably familiar to me. The drug use, broken families, dislocation, and men from poor communities used as military cannon fodder is as much a part of Indian country as it is the indigent black community in Hall’s story.

Eerily, the similarities don’t stop there. In the first act, Hall tells the story with her tongue in her cheek. I’m familiar with this kind of humor being used as a coping mechanism in Indian country, so I was surprisingly at home with its use in Hurt Village.

But the humor went away after the first act, and all I was left with were images of absentee fathers and people screwing their lives up with drugs. I see too much of that in real life, and it breaks my heart every time. I don’t need to see it when I go to the theater. But I wasn’t the only person in the audience. Maybe others there did need to see that kind of hopelessness and destruction? But I’m not so sure. I was the only Indian I was aware of there, and there were a few African Americans and Asians, but the audience was primarily affluent whites.

So my question is what is Hall trying to accomplish parading stories about poor blacks who have to sell crack to survive in Memphis in front of well-to-do white New Yorkers? The answer that seems most likely to me is that this is a therapy play – a piece to help the playwright work through some hurt that is setting on her. Once a playwright gets that out of her or his system, she or he can continue to tell all the other stories that need to be told. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before, the only difference is that the other therapy plays I’m aware of have an element of healing, something Hurt Village lacks. To further argue against my theory, this is not Hall’s first play. It could be that it takes her more than one play to work through her hurt, but based on my previous experience with this sort of theater, I’m left questioning her commitment to her community. Is Hurt Village really a constructive piece of art, that helps a traumatized community and/or person heal, or is it simply a playwright capitalizing on that trauma by selling it to the highest bidder?

That’s my question, but you can see for yourself and make up your own mind. Hurt Village plays at the Signature Theatre on 42^nd Street until March 18^th. Tickets are $25 at http://www.signaturetheatre.org/tickets/production.aspx?pid=1940.

News from the New Native California: Occupy and the Future of California Indian Journalism

2012-02-14T04:57:00.000-08:00

It may be that I’ve been attending Occupy protests for too long (cue simultaneous shouts of “Impossible!” and “Get a job!”), but I think I’m seeing the dialogue begun by the protests seeping into Malcolm Margolin’s “Publisher Notes” in this season’s issue of News from Native California.

Margolin begins every issue with a page about his recent travels through Native California, or reflections on what a great group of people Native Californians are, or the occasional plea for money. His “Notes” in this issue falls decidedly into the second category:

“California Indian culture offers the world a body of wisdom, knowledge, and practice that the human race needs if we are to save ourselves from social decay and environmental destruction.”

You’re welcome world.

He supports this assertion, which I promise I’ve already let go to my head, with a list of nine things everybody who’s not a California Indian can learn from those of us who are. I’m going to quote just three:

Few outcasts. A healthy society will have relatively few outcasts – prisoners, homeless, unemployed, insane.
Relative egalitarianism. A healthy society will not have too great a gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Economic security attained through networks of family, friendship, and social reciprocity rather than the individual hoarding of goods.

Did anybody else hear “We are the 99%!” ringing in their ears when they read this? I sure did, and it colored my reading of the rest of the News, specifically in regards to Mark A. Vezzola’s article “Protecting Native Spirituality behind Bars” and Lynne Paulson and Lynda Shoshone’s “Saving Washoe Meadows.”

Vezzola is an attorney with California Indian Legal services, and he contributed a story about his recent work fighting for the Spotted Eagle Circle’s right to engage in a summer solstice ceremony at California State Prison, Los Angeles County in Lancaster. It’s a great reminder that “the constitutional rights of prisoners do not stop at the prison door.” It also provides food for thought about the disproportionate number of Indians behind bars – we are incarcerated at a 38% higher rate than the general population (http://www.lenapeprograms.info/Articles/Prison.htm), as well as legitimize recent Occupy protests against the prison-industrial complex (http://occupywallst.org/article/nye-noise-demo-against-prison-industrial/).

“Saving Washoe Meadows” is about the Washoe People’s current fight to save spiritual territory from American incursion. What is the latest excuse given for the desecration of the Washoe’s land base and First Amendment rights? Is it gold? Not this time. Is it lumber? Not in Washoe Meadows. It’s a golf course. And if it disgusts you that there’s even a discussion about what gets priority here, then that makes two of us. And the Washoe are not alone: we Native Californians have been fighting for our country against the United States since 1849, and that fight continues over dam removal on the Klamath River, as well as in Washoe Meadows and elsewhere. In light of all this, I’m intrigued by what innovations on the part of Occupy might contribute to our fight. The idea of occupying an area indefinitely is itself interesting, but certainly nothing new to those of us familiar with Alcatraz and Wounded Knee II. What is new is the rise of the citizen journalist, especially the streamer who can broadcast events in real time from her or his phone. It’s good in urban areas like New York and Oakland, but I submit that it could be dynamite in the rural areas that many California Indians fight for. With only a smartphone and a portable hotspot, a single streamer can include hundreds (dare I say thousands?) of sympathetic Americans and citizens of the world in the fight for indigenous lands.

I love News from Native California. It has two things that too many other journalistic endeavors today lack: Indians and integrity. Its weakness, though, is that it can only bring us the news four times a year. In today’s 24-hour news cycle, that’s not enough. But the time is coming that new California Indian news will be available every time you turn on your computer. In fact, with current use of social media by Indians of my and my parents’ generation, that time may already be upon us. We will help fix the world, and I submit that, while the teachings of our elders and ancestors guide us, the tech savvy of our youth will drive the teachings home.

Stopped Bridge of Dreams

2012-02-05T05:32:00.000-08:00

Walking into La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre for John Jesurun’s Stopped Bridge of Dreams, one is struck by the compelling stage design. The seats are arranged across from each other on either side of the room with projection screens hanging and sitting in the space between them. A video swirls pinkish red above on two of the screens – is it blood or is it fire? The play even begins floating above the audience’s heads. The action drops to the ground with Black-Eyed Susan and Preston Martin playing Mrs. X and Hiroshi – the Madame of the flying brothel and one of her whores - respectively. Video and performance and a multiplicity of stories swirl between the audience until pouring into the core story of a flying whore-house, an embodiment of disincorporation and groundlessness. Even sex, normally so earthy, is uprooted in the frank and business-like manner with which the characters treat it. All emotion, in fact, was pulled from its normal human-centricity, and an atmosphere of flight supplanted it. Instead of emanating from the humans, it incorporated from the composition – the juxtaposition of dialogue and narration, human flesh on the floor and their video images projected from multiple angles above. The groundless atmosphere and lack of sentiment are a response, according to Donald Keene’s program note, to the work of Japanese novelist Saikaku Ihara, “whose books are called ukiyo-zoshi or tales of the floating world.” The broader genre of Saikaku’s ukiyo-zoshi or Jesurun’s Stopped Bridge of Dreams – fiction – is one uprooted from reality. What Jesurun does is radicalize that core element of fiction, and he does it in a smooth and seamlessly constructed way. It closes this February 5^th, but if he brings it back in your area, I highly recommend seeing it, especially if you’re interested in seeing the art of fiction exploded spatially before you.

#J20: Occupy the Courts NYC

2012-01-21T08:52:00.000-08:00

On January 20^th, to mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision, Occupy and Move to Amend hosted demonstrations and rallies all across the country. I streamed the doings in New York City at www.lenk.tv, which was a very positive experience. The police were good and didn’t assault anybody, and www.owsnyc.tv restreamed my work. From a political standpoint, I walked way with three disagreements with some of the arguments that were made at the event.

1.) OWS and Move to Amend hold that Citizens United gives corporations personhood. On the contrary, the ruling indicates that corporations are “associations of citizens” (§2.c.1.), as are unions (Preamble), and, I might add, Occupations.

2.) OWS and movetoamend.org hold that money is not speech. If this is the case, then how are we to understand boycotts of companies like Walmart or BP, or donating money to organizations like NPR or OWS? The first are statements that the subject does not support what the object does, and the second are the opposite. Or, according to Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United, “All speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech, and the First Amendment protects the resulting speech.” (§2.c.1.)

3.) Finally, Harvard professor and guest speaker Lawrence Lessig said that our country’s founders were classical republicans (as opposed to George Bush or Rick Perry or Rick Santorum Republicans) and believed that “representatives and citizens should think about the common good.” Some reading I was doing on the train seems to contradict that. The book was David Wallace Adams’ Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Adams was explaining the moral justifications given for America’s reeducation efforts. He quoted the core philosophy of Indian-policy reformer Carl F. Kaestle, the philosophy Kaestle and his cohorts wanted to convert the Indians to. The first three items on the list were “The sacredness and fragility of the republican polity (including ideas about individualism, liberty, and virtue); the importance of individual character in fostering social mobility; the central role of personal industry in defining rectitude and merit…” (11-12) These are related to the core Lockean concept of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property,” which Jefferson cited in the Declaration of Independence. It seems to me that the United States is founded on the same principles that not only dispossessed so many Indians of their land and cultures, but also on the basis of Greenspan’s idea that the market would self-regulate.

I disagree with OWS on these points, but I will continue to cover them as a citizen journalist because I do agree with them that horizontal and small “d” democracy are our country’s most likely route out of this economic and political mess. But if that kind of democracy is to happen, the public needs to be educated. So don’t ever just take my analysis, or Spencer Mills’ analysis, or Bill O’Reilly’s analysis of public events as gospel. Do yourself and your country a favor and check our sources. Here are mine:

Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

Citizens United v. FEC. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZS.html

“Move to Amend 28^th Amendment.” http://movetoamend.org/amendment

“Occupy the Courts NYC” www.lenk.tv

Ashland, Oregon's 24th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration

2012-01-17T08:34:00.000-08:00

Ashland, Oregon’s 24^th annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was cleanly divided into two events: the official, city sponsored event, and the Occupy teach-in afterwards.

The first event was hosted by the Historic Ashland Armory. It was a potpourri of art and speeches geared around King and his legacy. There were three kinds of things that happened. The first consisted of specific references to the historic Civil Rights Movement, the second of work that people are doing in Southern Oregon today that continue that legacy, and the third was DeLanna Studi’s recitation of an old Tecumseh speech. The benefit of the references to the Civil Rights Movement was to give young and emerging artists a venue to perform: from Crater High School’s Flag Team and Teen Theater that began with an allegory of segregation to Ben Badden’s rap about MLK, this event was a great showcase for some of the best young artists the Rogue Valley has to offer. The continuing of King’s legacy was represented Mary Farrell, founder of the Maslow Project that helps homeless kids living in the Rogue Valley, and the Ashland Food Project, which organizes long-term food donations for the Valley’s hungry. DeLanna Studi, a Cherokee actor with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, read a speech by Tecumseh. I feel it’s important for Native folks to get their voices heard, especially in events with a focus on racial justice.

I’m not sure how you can talk about one of the most prominent social activists of modern times and not address the waves of activism that are currently sweeping the globe, from Arab Spring to the Tea Party to Occupy. But Ashland’s MLK event said nary a word about any of these things. From where I was sitting, I wouldn’t have even known Occupy was in the area until I got to the plaza to hear King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and saw a few signs and an “Occupy” banner. In admittedly critical terms, it highlights the way that activism can be incorporated into the establishment and historicized, even while this establishment struggles with living activism. Occupy’s event didn’t retain as many people as the City’s. In fact, it seems that many of the folks at their teach-in were in one way or another associated with Occupy. It’s something that I noticed at Occupy Medford’s teach-in on January 11^th – the only people they were teaching were people who already agreed with them. Democracy can’t exist if the only people you talk about our common issues with are those who feel the same way you do. But the fault doesn’t simply lie with the Occupiers of the Rogue Valley. The general citizenry of the Valley seem to have time for activism that can be historicized and is safe, but not for living activism that threatens to change the status quo.

I might even say the same about Occupy Ashland. According to the conversations I had with Ashland’s Occupiers, which are now archived at Lenk.TV, attendance at their General Assemblies surpasses that of either Oakland or New York. So the democracy that I’m not seeing in their direct actions may exist in their GAs. The actions they are putting their hopes in, though, seem in keeping with Ashland’s relative conservatism that became apparent to me at the Martin Luther King event: they are working within the current system to create change in terms of homelessness and City banking practices in the Valley.

Spotlight on the USO

2012-01-13T09:26:00.000-08:00

This Thursday, Camelot Theatre premiered its new show, Spotlight on the USO. Camelot’s Spotlights are a recent innovation that, to paraphrase Artistic Director Livia Genise, feature “a little story and a lot of music.” This particular show is a deviation from previous Spotlights in that it doesn’t present the biography of an individual artist through music, but rather that of an artistic organization – the USO.

But I’ll come to all that later, because really the show Thursday night was a captivating 40s and 50s jazz concert by the Southern Oregon Jazz Orchestra. They played two sets of songs that I suppose were played for the service people overseas during the 40s and 50s, but that story was only secondary to what they were doing. They did branch out from their usual fare twice, both in the second set after intermission – once to give an example of the country music that started to appear in USO tours in the second half of last century with “Route 66”, and their final number was a medley of songs from the branches of the armed forces during which narrator Shirley Patton invited veterans of each branch to stand and be recognized during their song.

The meat and bones of the concert, though, were 40s and 50s jazz standards, and were they ever a hit! They had the audience singing along with “Minnie the Moocher” and others, and nearly every soloist got a rousing applause when they sat back down. Dianne Strong, a singer, was the featured soloist of the evening. An alto, she has a powerful focal and stage presence while she stays within her range. And when she takes short-note forays above her comfortable range, she’s riveting! But she certainly should not try to hold those higher notes – her attempt in “I’ve Got You under My Skin” was acoustically uncomfortable. While I’m pointing out weaknesses, the trumpet and saxophone sections could probably use a tune-up for “American Patrol,” but besides those two mistakes the concert was certainly a good night out.

Now let’s move on to the story part of the “little bit of story and a lot of music” equation. Peter Wyckliffe wrote the script, and Shirley Patton said it. Wyckliffe has certainly done his homework and has written a feast of information. This feast, however, lacks consistency: it ranges from history lesson with facts and figures to penetrating insights into what the USO was all about. The USO was and is meant to help the troops stay connected to home, and Wyckliffe illustrates that beautifully with a verbal illustration of the phones and letters and how they were and are often the only way the troops have to connect back to their families and loved ones.

The result of the inconsistent nature of Wyckliffe’s script is that it sinks or swims with the actor saying it, and it did both with narrator Shirley Patton. She got off to a slow start, and it definitely came off as a fairly dry history lesson. After she got into her groove, she came across as more grandmotherly and inviting. But she was always reading the script, and that was always a distraction. I suggest that a script is not necessary: the role of the narrator in this particular Spotlight was that of an MC. Some kind of structural outline that the performer can do from memory is what this part called for, but a word-for-word script is a death-trap. It makes the storytelling seem artificial, and Patton’s mixing up the U.S. Navy and Air Force songs when asking veterans from the different branches to stand at the end didn’t help.

While I’m on about inconsistencies, I have to take issue with the use of projections and backlighting. Designers Bart Grady and Brian O’Connor had three different things going on: pictures of the USO from the 40s and 50s up through the 80s and 90s, cool blue and purple washes, and a warm orange wash. The pictures were my favorite – they set the location for the story that Wyckliffe and Patton were telling. The cool washes gave an atmosphere of a smoky jazz bar and fit in a more general way for the orchestra, but not for the story. Orange is jarring color, but I probably would have forgotten about it if it had remained there the whole time. But the seemingly arbitrary shifts between images, cool washes and orange were, frankly, distracting.

That said, these weak points fall outside the crux of the show: the Southern Oregon Jazz Orchestra and their 40s and 50s jazz standards. If that’s your kind of music (and even if it’s not) it’s worth a listen. But if you’re going for the story of the USO, that part of the show has a few wrinkles it needs to iron out before I can walk away satisfied.

Spotlight on the USO is playing at Camelot Theatre, 101 Talent Ave., Talent, Oregon 97540 from January 12-22. Their box office can be reached at 541-535-5250. Tickets are $22, plus $2 for reserved seating.

#D12: A Morning in the Life of a Citizen Journalist

2011-12-13T08:06:00.000-08:00

I got up at 3AM on the morning of the 12^th to cover #OccupyWallStNYC’s march on Goldman Sachs as a citizen journalist. The West Coast Occupations were moving to shut down their ports, and the New York Occupation was marching in solidarity on a company that owns many of those West Coast shipping operations. This was my first action as simply a journalist and not as a protester, and I was excited to try out my new Ustream.tv channel, Lenk2012. I captured the march up to Goldman Sachs at 200 West Street, but then my phone told me my battery was running low, so I flipped over to the tried and true Flipcam. You can watch the march here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/lenk2012

The march was crowded and cold, but it helped to bring people’s energy up for whatever we were going to do at Goldman. We ended up marching once around the building looking for an access point, I suppose, but ended up relegated to the Vesey Street side once the police got their barricades up. So there the Occupiers held a mock press conference with Goldman Sachs, who was represented by a vampire squid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiGnt5IO3yg&list=UUINXCPX3wcJwlFv59xtiRWw&feature=plcp

As a dramaturg, I love the street theater and use of metaphor. I’m excited by the way that the political energy generated by Occupy is channeling into performative art. But as a journalist I’m less than thrilled. I don’t think ad hominem attacks are necessarily constructive. I think that what we need to heal as a democracy is talking about our problems and figuring out solutions together. I understand the issue that Occupy is bringing up, that nobody is listening when we talk, so we have to do more dramatic things. Shutting down ports is that. Calling Goldman Sachs a vampire squid to others who agree with you and the police just doesn’t seem that constructive to me. If only there was some way to get the word out to the rest of the world…

Oh! There is! And it’s journalism, ideally citizen journalism that isn’t beholden to corporate sponsorship! Journalism, when it does its job, keeps the public educated about what’s going on to fuel the conversations upon which democracy thrives! And it broadens the audience for street theater like the mock press conference, or the flash mob that happened just afterwards in Winter Garden across Vesey, a Brookfield Property:

Now some of you may have noticed that the second half of that video was police mobilizations. Now what you didn’t see is that, apparently, 8 of the 17 arrestees were citizen journalists: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/13/busted_for_tweeting/ . According to @OWSLivestream on Twitter:

@OWSLivestream OWS Livestream Team

NYPD cop watched our livestream on his phone to target our media crew and arrest them #intolerable #OWS #OccupyWallSTnyc #D12

My instinct to stay outside of the police parameter may just have protected my ability to gather and post video! Here’s one from the floor where a citizen journalist is take down, and says that the NYPD broke his camera:

One more interesting tactic on the part of the police: once we were all out back of the Brookfield properties, the NYPD blocked the view of the interior, of what they were doing with the arrestees. @caulkthewagon reports that similar tactics seem to have been employed in Boston, and the result is that BPD feels able to charge their arrestees with resisting arrest.:

@caulkthewagon Robin

This must be why they blocked the arrests from view-- so they could retroactively say anything happened. BPD even said we went peacefully!

You can watch my video of NYPD blocking our view here:

Inter-arts Collaboration at SBU: The Cabaret Collective and Shared Support Services

2011-12-11T06:03:00.000-08:00

CORRECTION: As per Becky's comment, I'd like to retract my statement about the Cabaret Collective not contributing to inter-arts collaboration, and insinuating that it might in fact do the opposite. She brought up many interesting facts that I didn't know, and that I encourage you all to read. ~W.L., 12-12-2011

The Cabaret Collective is an event that began about a year ago at Stony Brook University as a forum to facilitate inter-arts collaboration. The Staller Center houses the Theater, Art, and Music Departments, which, until this semester, have been autonomous from each other. This autonomy lead to a departmental insularity that John Lutterbie, then head of the Graduate Theater Department, and now head of both Art and Theater, found troubling. Under his guidance, Chris Petty of Theater reached out to his colleagues in Theater, Art and Music to form the Cabaret Collective, a periodic variety show exhibiting work from the three departments with the motive to spark dialogue and collaboration between us. The December 9^th Collective was successful, but not in terms of facilitating collaboration between the arts.

This Collective showed that the Music, Theater and Engineering students (there was a comedy troupe from the Engineering Department) are tending away from self-gratification and towards performativity. It’s my opinion that art of any kind needs to be for the audience – it needs to talk to and with them, not at them. College departments are beautiful in the artistic freedom that they provide, but one of the dangers of this freedom is that the art that comes out of them can be self-involved. This Collective showed that we can experiment and still engage audiences. A good example was Levy Lorenzo’s Stick of Joy. Levy is a percussionist, but his instrument for this piece was a joy stick plugged into a laptop plugged into the speakers. He used the joy stick to manipulate audio to create a musical piece. Levy’s a-rhythmic style can be disorienting, and the lack of an identifiable instrument could have compounded that disorientation. Instead it did the opposite. The newness of juxtaposing a technology that I remember as reaching its heyday in the 90s with his style of music was intriguing, and the way Levy performed the piece by throwing his whole body into its creation drew and held the audience’s focus.

Where the Cabaret Collective doesn’t seem to be succeeding is in its intended purpose – inter-arts collaboration. The sole representatives of such a thing were Timothy and Mallory Vallier’s Kinetic Petals (a dance/composition piece using a Kinect), and Belsazar, a poetry performance by Becky Goldberg of Theater and Lukas Kürten of Physics. But I’m not sure if these instances of inter-arts collaboration can be credited to the Cabaret Collective. Timothy and Mallory are husband and wife, and Lukas is becoming a fixture of the Theater Department outside of the Collective. The rest of the pieces were specifically music or specifically theater. Our friends from Engineering, Monroe Comedy, are included in that with their sketch comedy act. But I’m not sure we can expect much more – two evenings a semester aren’t enough to facilitate inter-disciplinary work on any meaningful scale. What will do this is interaction across disciplines on a daily basis.

This interaction has been happening on the graduate level through the Staller Departments, as well as English and Philosophy, encouraging students to come take classes with them. But another form of inter-departmental interaction has been happening, one that is more controversial, and one that . What is happening at Stony Brook University is called “shared support services.” This means, to quote Alyssa Melillo of the Stony Brook Press, “the administrative staffs of two or three academic departments are merged into one central entity where staff members can specialize in a certain department, but be available and prepared to handle responsibilities outside their specialization.” You can read her full article here: http://sbpress.com/2011/11/shared-services-from-scratch/.

While faculty and student resistance from the Humanities Building is stalling the process, for the present, shared services have been incorporated between Theater and Art with hardly a cry of protest. There are two reasons for this, I think.

The first has to do with personalities. Last year, Art didn’t have a permanent chair, and there was an atmosphere of distrust towards Nick Mangano of Theater. John Lutterbie, who now heads both departments, seems to be fairly popular professor whose heart is in the right place – he has a sincere inclination towards inter-arts collaboration.

The second is that the Theater graduate students seem unable to organize themselves towards a common political goal. This is the result, I believe, of divergent personalities and a general business with graduate level course work and the creation of art. I cannot speak to the graduate student culture in the Art Department, nor to undergraduate culture.

It’s my opinion that positivity towards Professor Lutterbie and a strong focus on individual projects draw our focus away from the larger issues that, among other things, means continued disciplinary insularity between the arts. These issues include:

· “Shared support services” mean merging of administrative staffs, not departments of disciplines.

· The goals for shared support services are not to facilitate the interdisciplinary goals of Lutterbie and many others in the Staller Center. They are to adjust to an $82 million budget cut. For more, please read President Stanley’s statement: http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/50forward/message3.html

· There is a widespread concern that shared support services will inhibit faculty and administration to provide quality attention to the students. This concern has been expressed by our colleagues in the Music Department (http://sbpress.com/2011/11/shared-support-in-progress/), in the Humanities, and by the GSO calling for transparency on the part of the Administration (http://www.sbgso.org/files/u1/resolutions/RESOLUTION%20ON%20SSCs.pdf). These concerns are being met by the University Senate, who has called a moratorium on shared support services pending further investigation into their viability.

The Cabaret Collective is an interesting experiment, and certainly a fun event, but fails to address the real impediments to inter-arts collaboration. In fact, by focusing our energies into the Collective, and our hopes in Lutterbie and shared support services, we may in face be distracting ourselves from more effective ways to facilitate inter-disciplinary work and contributing to continued insularity between departments.

All Night All Day, or How I Debuted on Broadway

2011-12-05T07:16:00.000-08:00

This weekend, a group of local theater artists created a 24-hour variety show on Broadway. By Broadway, I don’t mean in one of the big Broadway theaters. I mean on Broadway the street. Occupy Broadway, in solidarity with the NYC GA, opened the event on the red steps on Times Square, and then moved north to 50^th and Broadway – Paramount Plaza, a private-public park that they renamed “People’s Performance Plaza.” They describe themselves in their manifesto:

“We join in solidarity with fellow occupiers from Tahrir Square to Davis, California by challenging this restriction on access to the public commons [described earlier as private owners of public spaces reneging on their obligations to keep the spaces constantly open to public use] and by extension to democracy itself. Our creative resistance is using public space to create an exciting mix with public performances, art, and music in vacant, lifeless corporate, bonus plazas. Through such art, New York artists re-imagine their city as a work of art, rather than a shopping mall. With capitalism gone amuck, foreclosures increasing, and bank crises consuming whole communities, we are demonstrating another, more joyful way of living.”

And joyful it was. When I arrived, at around 1 in the afternoon, they were in kind of a lull, and the performance space was occupied by a discussion about the financial issues that have created the Movement.

But, the organizers found a way to pick back up the performative energy by bringing back “dramatic karaoke” from the wee hours of the morning (the event occurred from 6PM Friday to 6PM Saturday). Dramatic karaoke is when somebody recites, as if they were a dramatic monologue, song lyrics. I volunteered, and did the Beach Boys “Don’t Worry Baby.” Unfortunately, I can only do one thing at a time, so I didn’t record my Broadway debut. But here’s OWS photographer Eric doing “Sympathy for the Devil”!

Dramatic karaoke was one of the staples of the event, as well as readings of the First Amendment every hour on the hour.

There was also real singing, monologues, storytelling, short scenes, and dance. It was a variety show of the first degree. But probably one of the most telling things I heard there was the story of Big Bank: The Musical. Not the story of what happens in the musical, although that’s certainly fun, but the story of how the musical came to be and where it’s at now, which is looking for funding. The problem with doing even a light-hearted musical about a Big Bad Bank that takes sick pleasure in foreclosing on people is that “producers like banks.” Later that evening I was speaking to a young man named Raymond who told me that he feels that we are taught a shallow, unfulfilling lifestyle by corporate America in which we value material things above human affection. If what Adam Rapp of Big Bank says about producers is correct, then the musicals and plays happening in doors on Broadway are a part of the problem that Raymond sees. The street performance of Occupy Broadway offers an interesting alternative to that: it’s Off-Off-Broadway on Broadway.

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

2011-12-03T05:24:00.000-08:00

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.

Occupy Stony Brook Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples

2011-11-29T06:24:00.000-08:00

Last night, Occupy Stony Brook became the fifth GA that I know of to pass a Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples. Here's the text:

"RESOLUTION: Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples

WHEREAS, those participating in Occupy Stony Brook acknowledge that the United States of America is a colonial country, and that non-indigenous peoples are guests upon stolen land; and

WHEREAS, those participating in Occupy Stony Brook acknowledge that Stony Brook is already occupied land; Stony Brook being the historical Setalcott village of Wompowog; and

WHEREAS, indigenous Long Islanders and coastal New York urban Indians face higher levels of economic instability than non-indigenous people; and

WHEREAS, those participating in Occupy Stony Brook acknowledge that if the Occupy Movement is to have any legitimacy, it must join with all those who work to decolonize our society; and

WHEREAS, those participating in Occupy Stony Brook acknowledge that indigenous peoples here and around the world continue to resist the violent oppression and exploitation of colonizing nations like the United States, and as a result have a great amount of experience that could strengthen the Occupy Movement; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that those participating in Occupy Stony Brook seek the genuine and respectful involvement of indigenous peoples; and

As a sign to the national Occupy Movement and to indigenous peoples everywhere who have felt excluded by the colonialist language of “occupation,” it shall be declared that “Occupy Stony Brook” seeks to “Decolonize Stony Brook” with the active participation of indigenous peoples; and

Extending an open hand of humility and friendship, those participating in Occupy Stony Brook respectfully invite indigenous peoples to take part in the popular uprising taking place across the continent, while at the same time standing in solidarity with indigenous peoples in their fight for survival."

Where are we going to go from here, so that these just don't become feel-good words? We can get some hints from Boston and Oakland, whose GAs have already passed such Memorandums. Boston has an Indigenous Solidarity working group. For that to have any meaning here, we would need more Indians in the GA. Right now, I'm the only one. To do that, we would need to help out the indigenous community here on Long Island in visible ways. Oakland tabled the discussion this Sunday to change the name of their movement from "Occupy Oakland" to "Decolonize Oakland." That seems unlikely to pass for two reasons: 1) an unwillingness on the part of that GA to distance themselves from the "Occupy" brand, and 2) a fear of decolonization because it means that the place you make your home is in fact somebody else's home that was stolen from them in really really horrible ways. I think the two next steps for the Stony Brook GA to take are to 1) participate in solidarity with indigenous peoples in our fights here on Long Island, and 2) officially change the name to Occupy/Decolonize Stony Brook.

"Dead Man's Cell Phone" at SBU

2011-11-20T08:33:00.000-08:00

Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone is not my favorite play – I find it unremarkable and overrated. So I went in to Stony Brook University’s production (directed by Deb Mayo) with some trepidation – I wanted to like it, since some of my friends are acting in it, but my experience with this particular script has been less than satisfactory. That said, both of the seemingly mutually exclusive things I looked forward to happened – I sincerely enjoyed this performance of Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and at the same time I was able to put my finger on why exactly the script doesn’t resonate with me.

This play is about, to my current understanding, the alienating effect that constant cell phone use has on our society. By being constantly in touch with those who are not physically present, we disembody ourselves – an effect metaphored by death in this pay – and we yearn for the love of those in our actual proximity. This sustained loneliness results in social awkwardness. The accumulative impact of this morbidity and awkwardness is a sense of dark humor in Sarah Ruhl’s play. This humor comes across beautifully in SBU’s production. Nancee Moes, playing Jean, carries the play by embodying the full spectrum of morbid awkwardness, from falling in love with a dead man (Diogo Martins) and adopting his cell phone to keep him alive, to falling in love with his less charismatic brother Dwight (Eric Michael Klouda) in his dark and lonely stationary store. Klouda brought his character’s awkwardness alive by playing a clear objective in throwing himself at Jean. The situation in which he plays this action makes his character read as pathetically passionate, which works in favor of the play. Victoria DiCarlo was brilliant Mrs. Gottlieb – she plays her character’s need for constant attention to great comic effect, stealing the show in the scenes that feature her.

This cast did a fantastic job of bringing the best out of what I take to be a severely flawed script. This is my second time seeing Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and I wasn’t able to put together an account of what this play’s driving at until about halfway through this production. After the initial laughs at the awkwardness of Moes’ and DiCarlo’s characters, the play becomes a snoozer until the very end of the first act, when Dwight asks Jean if she loved his brother. “Oh!” the realization hits me, “That’s why she took his cell phone! I get it.” Unfortunately, my previous experience seeing the play was so unremarkable that I forgot that Sarah Ruhl makes it very explicit at the very end of the play that that’s what’s going on. Since this is the second time I’ve found a good chunk of the play a snoozer (and, to this cast’s credit, this time it was only a chunk) I have to wonder how many others have the same problem. As if that’s not enough, Ruhl falls into the self-indulgent trap that lies smack in the way of most playwrights, and ended the play a scene after it was finished. Honestly, we don’t need the epilogue telling us how things turned out for Mrs. Gottlieb. She’s fun, but the play’s not about her.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone is taking a break for Thanksgiving, but will return in Staller Center Theatre 1 on December 1^st through December 4^th at 8PM on Thursday through Saturday, and at 2PM on Sunday. It’s worth a look or two (some parts are double cast) for the sake of this brilliant cast. However, it’s a poor choice for the Stony Brook Theatre Department. There are so many plays out there that need to be done in college theatre because they’re still too experimental for the main stream. To do the same play as everybody else and their dog, especially one as flawed as Dead Man’s Cell Phone, is a disservice to the capabilities of the Theatre Department, and to the craft at large.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Closing

2011-11-13T09:07:00.000-08:00

Ranae Hedman

I tried things a little differently last night. Just before I left, I was listening to Jetty Rae on YouTube and got all inspired to be a musician. So I started playing on my box drum that I’m borrowing from my mom. I packed it with me to the theater, and when house opened, I was the

house music!

Ranae Hedman, Waylon Lenk

The show went fantastically again, and the talk back was once again longer than the show itself. People’s concerns about it maybe moving too fast in parts, script-wise, were apparent to me last night – it did feel like a race across the continent, as opposed to the 20 days one story says it actually took Pihnêefich. Afterwards, during the talk-back, we were able to focus in on where the play needs to be developed. I need to further develop Chris’ characters – the child, the Messiah, and Makataimeshkiakiak – and I need to explore the possibilities of setting it in a class room. After all, the Schoolteacher is the glue that holds Coyote Hunts the Sun together. And, to Ranae’s credit, she makes the role happen. I asked if maybe I should change her stories into the kind that exist in most text-books. Reidy Estevez, one of my students, showed me quite clearly that the answer is “no.” The Schoolteacher’s and Pihnêefich’s tellings of “Coyote and the Sun” form the bookends to the play and the journey – without her telling the colonial histories, there is little or no excuse for her to tell the pikvah.

Chris Petty

Waylon Lenk, Ranae Hedman

So what’s next for Coyote Hunts the Sun? Well, rewrites. I need to explore and develop the characters and their worlds. There are two stories that it seems I need to tell that don’t quite fit into Coyote Hunts the Sun. One is the Ghost Dance story – as I’ve mentioned earlier, I have a pretty strong bias against that particular ceremony, and what that tells me is that I need to learn more about it so that I’m not walking around carrying bad thoughts about those that did it. The second is the cannibal story that I try to tell during the Messiah scene. It was the first scene that I wrote for this play, but I’m realizing more and more that it isn’t part of Coyote Hunts the Sun, but is obviously a story that I feel compelled to tell. I need to tell it separately and get it out of the work at hand.

Ranae Hedman

It was a fun process, and now I have the post show blues. But while this phase of the project is over, we certainly haven’t seen the last of Coyote Hunts the Sun!

Waylon Lenk

Ranae Hedman

Waylon Lenk, Chris Petty, Ranae Hedman, Darci Faye

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Opening

2011-11-12T05:42:00.000-08:00

That’s right folks! Coyote Hunts the Sun opened last night! Darci and I got there early to run lights, and that went pretty smoothly. She just needed a little more practice. Then we took a little break to eat dinner and set up the marquee and fold programs, and then Ranae and Chris got there. We ran through it with lights and only one hitch – Chris accidently got locked outside. So we ended up taping the locks down on the doors.

When we finished, we started to do a little photo shoot. I took the first picture, and then the room went dark. Apparently five lights, a laptop and a projector are too much for our poor little Cabaret, and we blew a fuse. We rushed to plug everything that needed to be plugged in to sockets that still had juice, and we tried to pick the lock to the breaker room. We couldn’t, though. I guess that’s I new skill I need to learn on YouTube.

But we got everything rigged up in the nick of time, we got Chris’ stigmata on, and we opened the house (special thanks to Erin Treat for agreeing to be house manager at the last minute).

I killed the house lights, and Darci brought up the stage lights. I gave my little intro about the play, and Native Arts Forum at Wompowog (of which this is the flagship piece – more about that later) and then we started.

Half an hour later we finished. The coyote was cooked and the sun was risen. We took a five, and then started the talk back.

What an informative event! I realized that Coyote Hunts the Sun is not even close to finished. Some of the things that bothered people – like the non-linearity and layered voices – are things that they’re not used too, but that I loved. They’re staying for sure. But I do appreciate that things moved fast, and that combined with the layering makes it easy to get lost. When I start rewriting, I’m definitely going to take more time to develop relationships between Pihnêefich, Wovoka, Makataimeshkiakiak and the Schoolteacher. When I was talking to the two Natives in the audience (that I knew of) afterwards, they brought up that the Schoolteacher was doing exactly what schoolteachers should do – they should talk about the Wounded Knee Massacre and the boarding schools – these are things that the dominant culture has a responsibility to address and take a responsibility for. In the new, longer version then, the Schoolteacher is going to have to tell the stories that we find in history books. You know, how Indians are in the first chapter and then poof! we’re gone.

This version is going remarkably well, though, and I’m really grateful to have Darci, Ranae and Chris on board. But I am finding out where this piece needs to go next, and I can’t wait to learn more tonight.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, Tech

2011-11-10T05:10:00.000-08:00

Last night was our great big tech rehearsal, which went very smoothly. For the first hour, Chris and Darci and I focused the lights and got Darci set up with the light board. It’s her first time running lights ever, so that’s pretty exciting. She’s kind of nervous, but I’m confident that she’ll get it. At 8PM, when Ranae got there, we worked through all the tech cues, and then ran through it cue to cue. Darci’s still getting to know the light board, and, like I say, she’s nervous. But I know that once she familiarizes herself with it a little more, she’ll get confident and it’ll be a breeze.

The lights themselves are awesomely badass. We aren’t messing around with levels, so the high contrasts, along with the dramatic angles in which the lights are focused, give Coyote Hunts the Sun a film noire look. Combine that with the reds and blacks of our costumes, and I feel like I’m in an indigenous Nosferatu or something. The projections look cool, skewed and keystoned against the black cinderblock wall. The whole affect really augments the raw and driving atmosphere of Coyote’s hunt across the continent, and the conflict between him and the Schoolteacher.

Proposal to Occupy Wall Street: Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples

2011-11-07T05:54:00.000-08:00

This was in my in-box this morning. I would like to post it here and respectfully sign my name. ~WL

Proposal to "Occupy Oakland":

Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples

RESOLUTION: Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples

WHEREAS, those participating in “Occupy Oakland” acknowledge that the United States of America is a colonial (and imperial) nation, and that non-indigenous people are guests upon stolen indigenous land; and

WHEREAS, those participating in “Occupy Oakland” acknowledge that Oakland is already occupied land; Oakland being the historical territory of the Chochenyo Ohlone people; and

WHEREAS, those participating in “Occupy Oakland” acknowledge that indigenous peoples here and around the world continue to resist the violent oppression and exploitation of colonizing nations like the United States, and as a result have a great amount of experience that could strengthen the “Occupy Wall Street” movement; and

WHEREAS, those participating in “Occupy Oakland” acknowledge that after centuries of disregard for the welfare of future generations, and the consistent disrespect and exploitation of the Earth, we all find ourselves on a polluted and disturbed planet, lacking the wisdom to live sustainably at peace with the community of Life; therefore be it

RESOLVED, that those participating in “Occupy Oakland” seek the genuine and respectful involvement of indigenous peoples in the rebuilding of a new society on their ancestral lands; and

As a signal to the national “Occupy Wall Street” movement and the indigenous peoples here and there who have felt excluded by the colonialist language of occupation used to name this movement, it shall be declared that “Occupy Oakland" aspires to “Decolonize Oakland" – to “Decolonize Wall Street” – with the guidance and participation of indigenous peoples; and

Extending an open hand of humility and friendship, those participating in “Occupy Oakland” respectfully invite indigenous peoples to join the uprising against corporate greed taking place across this continent. “Occupy Oakland” wishes to further the process of healing and reconciliation and implores indigenous peoples to share their wisdom and guidance, as they see fit, so as to help restore true freedom and democracy in this country, to initiate a new era of peace and cooperation that will work for everyone, including the Earth and the original inhabitants of this land.

In Solidarity,

Corrina Gould (Chochenyo Ohlone)

Joanne Barker (Lenape [Delaware Tribe of Indians])¸ SFSU

Luz Calvo, CSU East Bay

Andreana Clay, SFSU

Andrew Jolivétte (Opelousa/Atakapa-Ishak), SFSU

Melissa Nelson (Anishinaabe [Turtle Mountain Chippewa]), SFSU

Kathy Wallace (Karuk, Yurok and Hupa), SFSU

Waylon Lenk (Karuk), SUNY Stony Brook

"Developing Dilemma within Occupy Oakland" by James E. Vann

2011-11-07T05:48:00.000-08:00

Here's a letter that James E. Vann of Oakland shared with Tony Platt who shared it with my mom and that I'm now sharing with you. I've heard that back in the 70s or 80s when the Forest Service was trying to build a road through our most sacred country in the mountains, AIM (fresh from Wounded Knee) approached the late Calvin Rube, then an elder and medicine man, and asked if we needed their help. Calvin told them, "Thanks, but I know how you do things. We can't have any violence there." It sounds like OO and #Occupy in general need to do the same thing with these anarchists. Keep it peaceful. ~ WL

Developing Dilemma within Occupy Oakland

At the general assembly of Occupy Oakland last night, a task presented from
the earlier facilitators' meeting was open discussion by the assembly
-- arranged in small groupings -- on the question: "How to Grow Occupy
Oakland into a Long-Term Sustainable Movement."

I was asked by a contingent sitting to my right to join with their group.
I was soon aware that most of the people who constituted our small group
were an interrelated faction. One early idea of one of the members was to
take OO to the "next level" by "taking over vacant buildings." I
injected my disagreement with the idea, that the remarkable success of the
entirety of Wednesday's general strike day had already become subsumed in
the media by the post-event "violence" of a small dissident contingent in
breaking into a nearby vacant building. (An act that led to the day's
first police appearance, a massive police descent in riot gear
-- replicating the defamed Oct 26 assault -- complete with tear gas,
flash-bang grenades, and bean bag projectiles. A three-hour riot through
surrounding blocks ensued, with dissidents setting fires, breaking store
windows, and widespread spray-painting of graffiti, ending in some 100
arrests and the serious wounding of yet another recently returned Iraq War
veteran on the scene as an innocent bystander.)

Others of the small group chimed in, stressing the need for OO to set an
example that other #Occupy organizations could duplicate by appropriating
indoor space for continuation of movement activities through the oncoming
rains and snows of Winter.
I suggested, in place of 'strike-day-like' events -- which can only be
infrequently carried out -- that OO implement a series of neighborhood
assemblies and marches in various neighborhood business districts
throughout the city. This would have the effect of educating
and recruiting new adherents to the movement from throughout the city. A
recent transplant from a southern city told of the dispersed nature of that
city, not suited to a centralized general assembly, but rather regional
assemblies, and suggested that OO look into a regional-type structure.

During the report-back session, few small groups made what I considered
positive or doable suggestions ("take over city hall;" "make city pay
for meals and housing;" "displace the city council," etc). However, in
what appeared an orchestrated tactic, each time a small group recommended
"taking over vacant buildings," it drew the loudest applause. When there
was any mention of "non-violent" actions, the dissident members, and their
compatriots dispersed throughout, yelled out almost in unison, "diversity
of tactics, diversity of tactics." It is clear that the dissident
anarchist group of some 150 or so is deeply embedded within Occupy
Oakland. (The morning's news shows gave the police breakdown of
Wednesday's arrestees as about 25% from out-of-state, the majority from
other cities and communities, and about 10 percent as Oakland
residents.)

On returning home, I read an unidentified quarter-sized blurb that had been
handed out during GA. The neatly printed blurb rationalized Wednesday
night's illegal takeover as the "logical next step for the movement,"
separated the question of "violence against property" (tactical) vs
"violence against persons (harmful), and proclaimed that "property
violence" occurred only after the cops arrived to dispel them from the
appropriated building. The blurb concluded with: "The point here is
obvious: if the police don't want violence, they should stay the hell[sic]
away."

Meanwhile, Oakland's embattled Mayor forcefully stated at Thursday night's
special speak-back session of the city council that "immediate control
of its violent members" is a primary condition for the Occupy Oakland
encampment to remain in Frank Ogawa Plaza (nee Oscar Grant Plaza).

Clearly, the present situation poses an extremely serious problem for
Occupy Oakland. Moreover, a wide disconnect exists between #Occupy
goals and anarchists' ideals. The anarchists see #Occupy as a "resistance
movement" requiring a vanguard to wage war against oppressive forces
(the police). Alternately, #Occupy's basic objective is to expose the
greed and attendant policies of Wall Street investors, bankers, and
mega-corporations that extract more and more the wealth of the country,
while the 99% and the needs of the many increasingly suffer with less and
less -- and to cause policy and program changes to restore equitable wealth
and resource distribution.

During "General Strike Day" actions, non-violent OO members who attempted
to halt acts, being perpetrated by the anarchist group, of property
destruction had their own safety threatened with claw hammers. The
dissident anarchist faction is deeply embedded throughout and has strongly
expressed its integration and inclusion as a legitimate part of OO.

Given the open nature of OO; its consensus decision structure; and the lack
of endorsed "leaders," it is unclear how OO will deal with an internal
situation that is structurally committed to an agenda of
"resistance," inherently contradictory to the aims of the #Occupy
movement. Unaddressed, this dilemma threatens the existence of at least
Occupy Oakland itself. Clearly, #Occupy, and specifically Occupy
Oakland, is faced with a dilemma on incompatible paths that at
present seems only likely to continue diverging.

James E Vann,
Oakland, California

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Trailer

2011-11-07T05:42:00.000-08:00

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Poster

2011-11-06T10:20:00.001-08:00

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, Dress Rehearsal

2011-11-06T06:03:00.000-08:00

Last night we held our first and only dress rehearsal! And I remembered all my lines! Running them before with everybody helped. While we ran them, we painted stigmata on to Chris’ hands for the Messiah scene. He looks super badass/creepy in his black cowboy boots with his black shirt buttoned all the way up.

So we ran lines, and then we ran the show, which happened without a hitch. Darci didn’t even have any notes! She is getting nervous for tech though, because that’s going to be her one shot to learn the light-board. We’ll figure all that out on Wednesday.

Adding the costumes did give me some more information about the play, besides just how cool Chris looks as the Messiah. It didn’t seem to affect anything with Ranae – she always dresses like a teacher anyways – but adding in my hat gives me a good bit of business in the Messiah scene. In it, I have a line, “I have to go find the sun,” that I usually say as I go out the door. Chris’ line, “The sun? The sun will come in the morning. Wait here a while with me,” doesn’t seem to have the force to stop me. That’s always been an awkward part. But having the cap to put back on before I go outside does give me something to do before I open the door.

The blanket that Chris and I wear has a pretty cool effect, at least on him. I haven’t looked at the footage I took last night, so I don’t know how it looks on me. But it adds a substantial bulk to Chris in the Makataimeshkiakiak scene that makes him imposing without him having to really do anything about it.

All in all, a good rehearsal, and one that I filmed! Look forward to the commercial that I’ll be putting out on my YouTube channel (“WaylonLenk”) later today!

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, November 4

2011-11-04T13:51:00.000-07:00

This baby has legs! Today we ran this sucker through twice, but before that, Becky and Christina helped Chris and I move the curtain across the space to create our backstage, and we set up the chairs. The space is what it’s going to look like now!

Then we did it for Becky and Christina. Man, that felt good to do it for new people! Ranae said it felt the same for her. B & C couldn’t get over how well she’s doing. They said this idea I had to give her lesson plans instead of lines is sheer genius! It definitely seems like Ranae and Darci are people that we’re all going to be keeping in mind when we cast future stuff.

After our first run, Darci had Chris and I run our lines for the Messiah and Makataimeshkiakiak scenes. It’s a little obscene how poorly I’m doing with memorizing two of the lines I wrote: “It smells good” and – shoot, I can’t remember the other one. Chris and I were a little afraid of Darci when we started doing it again, so the Messiah scene was kind of halting, but other than that the run went well. We’re down to 26 minutes now, and it’s feeling like nuclear fusion! Or fission! Whichever’s cooler. We just decided that before tomorrow night’s rehearsal, Chris and I are going to have to run lines. But once we’re running it, we just have to let it roll.

My Reply to Vickie Ramirez

2011-11-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

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

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, November 2

2011-11-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

Last night was a lower key rehearsal, due to my recent cold, in spite of it being our very first walk through. It was good to do the whole thing straight through and to see how it flows, which is nicely.

To start off, we plugged Ranae into the Makataimeshkiakiak sequence. It definitely makes a lot of difference having her teach the lecture notes as opposed to Darci reading them. It heightened the tension in that scene, making it, in my estimation, the most explosive in the play.

Then we walked through it off-book. The first time through we had a lot of stops and starts, mostly due to me not knowing all the lines that I wrote for Pihnêefich yet. But it worked, and ran about half an hour. The second time through was smoother and ran about 27 minutes. It’s great having Darci on the team as the objective eyes in the house. She helped us strengthen the visuals in the Makataimeshkiakiak scene by having Ranae, Chriss and I move into two lit playing spaces separated by a wall of dark, and re-blocking the Introduction by putting the Pihnêefich-Grant physical relationship on a diagonal across the audience.

Know that we all know our lines, we’re ready to run it a few more times on Friday, and then start putting in costumes and tech. We’re going to have a great show next week!

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 30

2011-10-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

It’s been one heck of a week, and what a productive way to cap it off! This afternoon Darci, Chris and I worked through the Makataimeshkiakiak, or Black Hawk, scene. I’m trying to refer to him by his name in Sauk. It seems more respectful.

Darci had to get there late today, so Chris and I read through the scene several times just getting the feel for it. Several textual changes were in order, but the blocking flowed pretty naturally out of it.

When Darci arrived, she watched the scene. Her note was, “It’ll be interesting to see how it works with Ranae in it.” In this scene, the Schoolteacher is trying to give a lesson while Makataimeshkiakiak and Pihnêefich have their jailhouse scene. The gist is supposed to be competing storytelling. But Ranae couldn’t be with us today, so I asked Darci to step in and read her part. I wasn’t sure it was working, but after talking to Darci and Chris when we were done, I’m convinced that the competing storytelling will work as compelling theater. But we’ll find out for sure when we plug Ranae in on Wednesday.

Now it’s time to rest up. I feel the start of a sore throat coming on.

Like a Brick in Your Pocket

2011-10-30T12:39:00.001-07:00

Last night I went to see my friend Becky Goldberg’s MFA project in our Staller Center Cabaret. It ended up being a good, albeit heartrending, night out.

Like a Brick in Your Pocket is an exploration of grieving devised by Becky and her crew of 10 performers. Becky gathered stories mostly from people who had lost someone near and dear to them – a parent, a child, a sibling – and a few from pre-existing works. This is what I knew when I went in to see her play. When I took my seat, all 10 performers were sitting in the performing space. There was no backstage, and no room for a whole lot of movement. The play seemed to me to be a little slow starting off. The performers probably hadn’t gotten into their groove yet.

But once they got into their groove, the stories went right to my heart. Because there was no putting on, and barely any artistic conceits until the very end. It was just raw grief, and the words carried it. You didn’t need the performers to move around, you didn’t need vivid visuals, all you needed was the stories and the performers to sell them. And when one of the performers did get up and move through the space towards the end, the gentle contrast was stirring, and it seemed like the audience bought it. I know I did.

If Becky puts this up again someplace, I recommend seeing it. The issues addressed are universal, and the execution is sensitive and poignant. The only thing that might get in the way of it being done again, and this came up the talk-back, is her use of copyrighted material. Honestly, the play doesn’t need it, and it can only serve to hold it back from a logistical standpoint, although it works thematically.

They've Got Mail!

2011-10-29T16:08:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wall Street sure knows how to keep things loose. I got to Bryant Park at one o’clock to meet everybody. I didn’t see any protesters, but I did see a lot of cops. I sent that news out on Twitter and sat down, pulled out my book and waited. About 1:45 I saw on Twitter that they were congregating on the other side of the block – in front of the Library – so I headed over there. There were fewer people than I’d expected. We got ourselves organized and then headed out. But, before we did, we handed out some of the 6,000 letters that people from all over the country had written to the CEOs of the banks we would be visiting. Some of them we made into paper airplanes, just in case the bankers wouldn’t take them at the door:

The cops caught up with us as we took off. I should mention that NYPD was courteous and well-behaved: they mostly kept in the street to make sure we didn’t spill into it, and they even made sure we didn’t get hit by cars when we were crossing, just as long as we made reasonable attempts to follow the pedestrian walk signals. They didn’t even bring along their zip ties! Here’s a video of that kind of epic march:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh2PMpEo1Hs

We went to CitiGroup first. Out of our 6,000 letters, this bank only accepted two. So we threw a bunch more as paper airplanes at their sign. We did pick up after ourselves, so it was mostly symbolic. Here’s that video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-y5kgwoD5Y

Then we crossed the street to Wells Fargo, who had their plaza blocked off with barricades, private security and cops. So we did a singing telegram for them. Our last stop was JP Morgan Chase, who, if you remember, gave $4.6 million to the New York Police Foundation. We met up with the other group, who had visited Bank of America and one other one and sat down to have a General Assembly (GA) on the sidewalk. Of course we left an aisle on the edge for pedestrians. Here’s that video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlG9BZ0pfzE

After we’d read some letters, and heard a speech by a young woman from Tahrir Square, Egypt, we went around to the front. JP Morgan Chase accepted all our letters! Hopefully they read some before they shred them. NYPD was in front in force, including the hard looking plainclothes boss you see in the video. You’ll also see that they’re starting to use video technology. Hopefully they’re next lesson will be non-violent ways of dealing with non-violent protests. It seems that they’re starting to get that lesson from their behavior on this march. Let’s knock on wood it sticks.

Afterwards we had a subway party back to Liberty Square, where I broke out my sign (which got a mention in the North Coast Journal – check it out: http://www.northcoastjournal.com/news/2011/10/27/karuk/11/) and represented my People a bit. It got some funny looks and a few questions. One queerperson (as he identified himself) had just read an alternative history book that mentions Indians in the first chapter (not so alternative there) and was really excited about the idea of two-spirits. The young lady standing next to me said she’d called every reservation in the States to let them know about OWS. I got her card. Word’s getting out that we Indians didn’t all die at Wounded Knee, and that we’re still fighting for our sovereignty. But it needs to get out more. If you’re an urban Indian, take every opportunity to represent the issues of your people to the rest of America and the world. If you’re a rez, rancheria, River, or Pueblo Indian, get the word out to your cousins in the cities about what needs to happen at home so they can represent.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 29

2011-10-29T16:02:00.000-07:00

Today it was just Ranae and me. Torrential weather outside, so perfect weather for telling the story of the Wounded Knee Massacre inside.

The “Wounded Knee Sequence,” as I’m calling it, is really Ranae’s scene, where her character has regained power in the play, and is regaining momentum. The process with all of these lesson plans seems to be to get her comfortable enough telling the story that she can put it into her body. Once she gets to that point she’s really an engaging storyteller.

After we got that sequence up to speed, I had her do all of her lesson plans in sequence without interruptions. The only transition that was tenuous is the one between the stealing of Indian children and the Ghost Dance. That tells me that the Ghost Dance lesson plan is a direct reaction to the Pihnêefich/Messiah scene.

Radclyffe

2011-10-29T15:59:00.000-07:00

I finally made it to my friend Kestryl Cael Lowrey’s show! I missed hir earlier 348, but I’m glad I made it to Radclyffe. It was playing at the Theatre Workshop on

36^th St.

as part of the Fresh Fruits Autumn Festival. “Fresh Fruits” is actually a pun, because it’s a festival of plays by queer artists.

Kestryl and I went to Lewis and Clark together, and ze was a year ahead of me in the theater department. Kestryl is transgender, and seems to have always been interested in queer theater. Back college, ze used the masculine pronouns for hirself, but now it seems like ze’s using “ze” and “hir.” This is my little disclaimer to say that I’m not totally familiar with these words, so let me know if I get one of them wrong.

So Radclyffe. Radclyffe Hall was an “invert,” or butch writer in the earlier 20^th Century. Kestryl’s one-person show is a meditation on Radclyffe’s life and its lessons for queer culture today. The show, as it stands, is definitely geared towards a queer audience. However, it seems to me to be a first draft of something bigger, and, if I may, more important. Radclyffe’s life goal, as presented by Kestryl, was to communicate lesbian life as it is unashamedly to the mainstream. She had to compromise this goal because of the times she lived in: she felt, according to Kestryl, that the only way to do this was to make the lesbian protagonist miserable. Hence the title of her book, The Well of Loneliness. Kestryl is pushing for Radclyffe’s original concept, in which the protagonist is happy, leads a fulfilling life, and nobody has a problem with it.

Radclyffe the play is the first draft of that. But the burden, it seems to me, isn’t on the queer community. It’s on the mainstream. After all, for all their political activism, Kestryl and hir compatriots can’t force anybody to accept them. It has to come from us. In a later draft of this play, I’d like to see it done for an audience of more than ten, in which more than 10% is part of the mainstream. And that we’re there because we want to be there, not because it makes us feel like a bigger person. That’s a terrible reason. The good reasons are things like: it’s a fun thing to do, to support your friends, because you’re curious about who, exactly, Radclyffe Hall is. You know, all the reasons I went. So I guess the burden on the mainstream is to be more like me.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 26

2011-10-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

Last night’s rehearsal was smooth sailing. The only troublesome part was hashing out how the songs towards the end are going to work, and the only change I had to make to the script was actually an un-scripting of the car-chase scene. Just like I’ve been creating structures for Ranae to riff on as the Schoolteacher, and for me when I tell the story at the end, I let the words I wrote for the car-chase go, and just riffed on the high points. This allows me to have a much more organic, even flirtatious, relationship with the audience.

The transition songs between the Battle of Kekionga and the final story troubled me at first, because I just wasn’t feeling it as an organic transition. So we tried a thing or two, tweaked this and that, and ended up pretty much with the structure I’d written, with only the minor change of having Ranae sit after she starts singing. My singing, while it felt unmotivated when we started rehearsing it, seems to derive organically from the tension that Ranae and I create in the Battle of Kekionga. The songs do provide the atmospheric bridge that I need between the Battle and the final story.

All in all, I’m pleased with the direction Coyote Hunts the Sun is headed, and I’m especially confident with this final sequence that we rehearsed last night.

News from Native California, Fall 2011

2011-10-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

It’s Fall, and the Natives are restless! And well we should be. The latest issue of News from Native California paints a bleak picture of selective law enforcement. It’s something the dominant culture is becoming increasingly aware of as NYPD officers get away with assaulting peaceful demonstrators, and Occupy Oakland gets raided military style: pre-dawn with rubber bullets and tear-gas. But it’s something we Indians have been aware of all along.

In the late 1800s, California Indian religions were outlawed and suppressed. Today, even with AIRFA and the Native American Free Exercise of Religion Act, law enforcement still chooses to suppress our religions and related cultural practices.

The cover story in this issue is about the Winnemem Wintu’s dire straights in the face of selective law enforcement by the United States Forest Service. Doesn’t the United States Constitution saw that “Congress shall make no law respecting a religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”? And didn’t the U.S. government reinforce the Constitution with the two laws mentioned above? Then why, I ask, does the Forest Service choose to enforce the Farm Bill’s discrimination against non-recognized tribes above and beyond the First Amendment? Why does Fish & Game fine Wesley “Kwassuh” Dick $800 for traditional gathering on tribal lands? Why, and this is not in the News, does the Forest Service fine my parents for having a fire as part of my mother exercising freedom to her indigenous religion in our sacred mountains?

The news isn’t all bad. The Pechangas are pushing for legislation that will protect one of their sacred mountains. This legislation will probably pass, incidentally, because the Pechangas are rich from casino money, which they can get because they’re a recognized tribe. I posit that one of the reasons that the Winnemem haven’t gotten recognition, is that then they could push to return the McCloud arm of Shasta Lake to its pre-dam condition.

And people ask me why I occupy at Liberty Square. This is why!

Releasing the Days

2011-10-25T06:47:00.000-07:00

Stephen Meadows, in this summer’s issue of News from Native California, suggests that you take his poems as his contribution to indigenous California literature, which is oratory, by reading them aloud. So I sat down in my rocking chair to do just that with his new anthology, Releasing the Days, published by Heyday Books. I wasn’t three poems in when I realized that the indoor environment with the glow of my computer screen just wasn’t right for Meadows’ words. So I went to my porch and read this little book out loud to these Long Island suburbs in late October. And the poems took me back to the fields and mountains of Ohlone country, to the south of the Bay Area, and to the ponderosas and manzanita of my own country, and to the gorgeous monotony of central Nevada.

Meadows’ writes his country in a way only rivaled by John Steinbeck. The country between L.A. and San Francisco, where the Ohlones make their home, has the most quiet monotony between San Diego and Ashland. Meadows’ art looks into those fields and mountains and beaches and brings the beauty and pathos of the land and its indigenous people into gentle relief. His words, and his feelings, flowed from the page to my eyes to my mind to my lungs and out on my breath into the cool fall air of a distant land and every so often I’d stop to let one sink in, or read it again and commit it to memory. I’m happy to have this little book of poems in my library. It helps take me home to California, at least in my mind; and it reminds me of the importance of sitting out and looking at the world, an important lesson to remember while I live here in New York.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Rehearsal Log, October 22

2011-10-23T12:01:00.000-07:00

Last night we finished the second week of rehearsals with the Ghost Dance sequence. As a playwright, director and actor, I’m excited with how this scene is shaping up, especially since it’s descended from the first scene I wrote for this play. From a storyteller’s perspective, however, I’m concerned with how much I’m leaving out.

In this scene, Pihnêefich confronts the Ghost Dance Messiah, and begins to take control of the story away from the Schoolteacher. Ranae Hedman, who is playing the schoolteacher, is doing fabulously. She’s one of those awesome actors who have a penchant for research, and she came in knowing more about California Indian slavery than I do. She knows the stories better than she thinks she does, and so our process with her is just to get her out of her own head.

The confrontation really works. I hadn’t blocked it out before-hand: I wanted Chris Petty and me to do it and see what happened organically. With my assistant director Darci Faye’s help, we created a tense standoff between two vicious predators. Pihnêefich is, after all, Coyote, and there’s nothing lamblike about this Messiah!

And that’s where I feel I’m not doing the Ghost Dance story justice. I don’t think Wovoka was a bad person, and I think most of the Ghost Dancers did it with their hearts in the right place. After reading Mooney’s The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, the seminal book on the Ghost Dance, it became clear to me that the tribes that really took to it had seen their religions decimated, and perhaps had already been pushed from their homelands. It’s easy for me, a 21^st century Karuk, to say they should have stuck with their own religions, but in too many cases that was impossible. Do I think they would have been better off if they had? Absolutely, and I take that stance strongly in Coyote Hunts the Sun. Do I appreciate that they were doing the best that they could? Yes, I do, but I’m concerned that that part of the story does not come out in my play.

How Birds Got Their Feathers @ Times Square

2011-10-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

The first step in this juxtaposition I'm working on:

Indian Eyes Back on Liberty Plaza

2011-10-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

This week, OWS advertised that they were doing a series of “Open Forums,” and this Friday was supposed to be on student loan debt. I figured I ought to check it out, both to sate my curiosity about what, exactly, an “Open Forum” is, and because I have student loan debt. A lot of student loan debt.

So I trucked my tookus into the City and headed in to Liberty Plaza. About a block off, I saw the streets lined with parked cop cars and I could see flashing lights down by the Plaza. Was it a raid, like they had in Melbourne the night before? I was worried it might be. I figured I’d go see, and if it was, try to not get arrested. And then I realized that I was meeting a friend there, and she might already be there, and then I’d have to figure out how to save her.

I walked down Liberty, my muscles tense, my senses sharp. I got to Broadway, and it wasn’t cop lights at all. It was fire trucks! I guess there was an unrelated fire further down Broadway. The cops were on the Plaza thick as flies on a dead cat on an August afternoon. They were being good, though. I even saw them having genial conversations with some of the protesters. I guess the ones in Harlem weren’t doing as well with the whole “serve and protect” thing. They must think that cops making random arrests in black neighborhoods is a good way to win people’s loyalty. Sheesh. Liberty Plaza was alright, though.

I wandered around looking for the open forum. I didn’t find the one on student loan debt, but, really, the whole Square is an open forum. Everybody there has something to say, and they’re saying it. Talk about a vibrant atmosphere. I loved hearing, at different times in different places, somebody holler “Mike check!” Bystanders would holler it back, and then they’d have the call-and-response speeches that have become iconic of Liberty Plaza. I also found the People’s Stage, which was having an open mike night. Anybody who wanted could have five minutes to say or sing their poetry. Mostly it was hard to hear – there is a lot of background noise – but overall it only added to the excitement that is Occupy Wall Street. Here’s a clip from one of my favorite performances:

All in all, it was a much more positive experience than the last time I was out. I love the openness of it all – how anybody with something to say can say it. Next Friday I’d like to come out to the People’s Stage with something about Klamath Dam removal. Apparently, the Yreka hicks might make problems for us getting those abominations torn down.

Theater of Place Workshop

2011-10-22T08:12:00.000-07:00

This past Thursday night I attended a “Theater of Place” workshop with Gerard Stropnicky of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. Talk about an inspirational evening!

First, what is “Theater of Place?” It’s a theater piece intimately rooted in a specific geographic location. What Gerard and his playwright collaborator Jo Carson do is travel to rural communities in the U.S. where they develop plays with the community based on community stories, very frequently stories of communal trauma such as a long-since-passed child-molester, or lynchings in the South. Gerard’s workshop gave us a taste of how they collect and develop these stories:

After we did a big warm-up to get everybody laughing, he split us into pairs and “pods” of pairs. In each pair we told each other a story about a time that we, personally, felt supported. Then, we told the story back to the original teller in the first person. We picked one of these stories to present to our pod, and then the pod as a whole picked one of the stories to tell to the whole workshop. Then we had 10 minutes to turn it into a little skit.

Afterwards, he read us a transcript of one of the stories he and Jo have gathered in their professional work. It dealt with childhood sex-abuse. He only shared one transcript with us, but apparently they’d gotten the same story from 5 different women in this community. Then we read the script that they developed from these stories for the community to perform as a way to confront and hopefully begin to heal from this social wound.

What did I learn? First, I was reminded of the importance of improvisation and allowing the group to work semi-democratically to devise a way to enact stories. I was reminded of the importance of warm-ups to get the group laughing together. And I was inspired to bring some of these techniques (or versions of them) home to the River with me to help tell our stories with my People.

Indian Eyes in Times Square

2011-10-16T07:55:00.000-07:00

Cops make me nervous on the best of days. After too many stories of them picking on Indians and blacks because they can, or my dad because of his long hair and beard back in his Coos Bay days, I know that they can do whatever they want to you. As sick as it makes me to say it, cops are above the law. But I was especially nervous heading in to occupy Times Square on October 15^th. I’d seen videos on YouTube that morning of cops running over peaceful protesters and clocking a girl in the face on Wall Street on Friday morning. And when I saw all the blue and white and their metal barricades assembled around Times Square, I felt afraid. Welcome to the America the rest of us live in, white part of the 99%!

I have to give the men and women in blue and white their due, though. They were respectful and acted like civilized human beings during the first part of the protest. When the marchers from Washington Square Park arrived, Times Square filled up with signs and chants for a chance in our American economy. Where my friend and I stood, under the Stars and Stripes between 46^th and 47^th, a brass band played, and dancers in formal wear and stilts danced. It was a beautiful feeling to be there. While they danced, organizers came around and passed out sparklers and candles. When dusk came, we lit them and sang “This Little Light of Mine.” I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’m including a link to my video of it. Please excuse my monotone: I don’t really know that song.

If you watch the second video, I don't sing as loud, so it sounds nicer. Then we did a speech using what I think is called the “human microphone.” The speaker shouts out a phrase, then the group nearest her or him shouts it behind them, then the next group shouts it behind them, and so on and so forth. This is to facilitate a more democratic style of public speaking: where one or a few people have a microphone or a bullhorn, they can monopolize the discourse. After the speech, about 6:30, Amy and I left to grab dinner: we were hungry, and she had to grade. Darn grades, they get in the way of everything.

After dinner, about 7:30, we headed back to the Square, me to check it out some more, and Amy to catch the subway. The cops had it locked down. Here’s a video of some of the bad parts that were thankfully away from where Amy and I were standing:

I couldn’t get through the Square, so I cut out to 6^th Ave. The cops were there in force, too. And there were some protesters, but not for long. The boys and girls in blue moved us on out. I heard a rumor that they were authorized to use tear gas. Whatever it takes to protect the rich, I suppose. On the train ride home, I saw on Twitter that there was a standoff happening at Washington Square Park. Earlier in the day, NYPD arrested a group of people closing out their accounts at Citibank. Interesting fact, on October 3, JP Morgan Chase gave the New York Police Foundation $4.6 million. Have a look:

What do I want this morning in regards to the events of yesterday afternoon and evening? Well, first, I want the cops to stop acting like little piggies protecting the big fat hogs, but I always want that. What I want that’s probably a more realizable goal is to see a bigger Indian presence! I saw on Facebook that my Mohawk colleague Maxton Scott was representing in LA, and I was out yesterday with my Karuk sign. But nobody there seems to know what to make of Indian activism in the Occupy Movement, let alone what “Karuk” means. In The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the writers compare OWS to other activist movements, but the Indian activism of the ‘60s, 70s, and early 80s is notably absent. There is a lone quote by the New York City General Assembly’s People of Color that has a lone reference to “indigenous people” buried somewhere between black and “diversity.”

If anybody needs this Movement, or one like it, it’s us Indians!

OWS Sign

2011-10-14T12:45:00.000-07:00

Indian Eyes on Wall Street

2011-10-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

I’d been avidly anticipating my visit to Zuccotti Park. I’d been following the occupation on Facebook since Bologna maced those girls, and frankly, I wasn’t going to go if there wasn’t a clear focus to the protests. I didn’t want to get maced and arrested if I didn’t know what it was for! But after keeping tabs on the movement, it seemed like the police violence was more or less isolated incidents, and the general frustration with the status quo is a feeling that the protesters and I share. So I set out on Friday to have a look. I told myself I was only going to check it out, but I’d already designed a sign in my head. It would have a basket design border, and inside it would say

KARUK COUNTRY

OCCUPIED

WALL ST.

As I got ready to go, I told myself the classic Karuk story “How Birds Got Their Feathers,” about an uprising in the myth times, the pikvaharik. On the train ride in I read about the Alcatraz occupation in a News from Native California back issue. My anticipation only intensified when I got off the train and saw soldiers and MTA cops with assault rifles in Penn Station. I took the A train to William St. and walked to Wall St.As it turns out, Liberty Square is on Liberty and Broadway. I got to see the police barricades on Wall St. though. When I got to Zuccotti Park, it was interesting to note that there was only one cop there. NYPD has people stationed pretty heavily around the protest, but they’re keeping back by a block. Also, they were all blue shirts.

Anyways, I got to Zuccotti Park, and it was like the Ashland, OR plaza times 50. It wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as I’d anticipated. I guess it was just a quiet afternoon. But it occurred to me that one of #ows’s strengths is its ability to build hype. Every body sees the energy and the arrests on the internet, but not the slower times. I walked in and immediately got interviewed. If that kid ever posts it and I find it, I’ll hyperlink it to this blog. And then I asked one of my interviewers to tell me his story. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wxMfHTzfqk

And then a bystander wanted to talk to the cameras, so I figured “what the hell?” Here’s a little taste of what I got:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYLDIoiTjnA

I have about ten minutes of that. Apparently, #ows is starting to attract kooks. When I started to wander, I saw someone I thought I recognized. He was a stoner type sitting with other stoner types between some planters. I walked up to say “Hey, do I know you?” and a bigger blonde hippie stood up to block my path. You know how on TV someone will try to walk up to the mob boss in his private restaurant and the big dumb muscle stops them? That’s what that was like, except he didn’t intimidate or stop me. Turned out the guy I thought I knew was somebody else. Still, it was disconcerting to be in an event that purports to be egalitarian and to have that happen. I was talking to one of my poli-sci housemate about it later, and he told me that there are a lot of different groups in Zuccotti Park, and even though they’re all their together, they don’t all get along. Also, there’s a quiet shuffling for power. Although they say it’s a “leaderless revolution,” every revolution has a person or group who takes a leadership position. In this case, whoever gets to represent the movement to the wider public becomes the de facto leader. So far, though, #ows has managed to keep a healthy balance of power between the various constituents.

The Occupation has its strengths and it has its weaknesses. Its use of social media and hype has allowed it propagate itself not only in NYC, but across the country and into Galloway and New Zealand. And it’s current status as a leaderless, and therefore focus-less revolution has made it into an open forum for people to voice their own frustrations with the status quo. It’s a shame that some of the people are self-important kooks, but I suppose that comes with the territory. It’s also a shame that it’s primarily middle-class white folks. #ows is not representative of the 99% until the Latino, Asian-American and African-American communities are a visible presence. And this thing won’t benefit us Indians unless we are able to harness the positive energy that #ows is generating to re-occupy Wall Street and push to have our own burning issues addressed.

The Face of America

2011-10-05T05:43:00.000-07:00

The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis has just published a short anthology of plays for young people. Each of the plays has been recently produced by CTC, and all share certain qualities that paint an interesting picture of the issues that today’s American youth face.

All four of the plays deal with the sometimes charged relationships between ethnic groups, and with parental absence. Larissa Fasthorse’s Average Family is composite of historic Native/Euro-American relations phrased in a way to which today’s non-indigenous youth can hopefully relate. Two families, an assimilated Indian one (with minimal family cohesion) and a redneck one (who are their own little militia), are pitted against each other on a reality show. A ten-year-old Russian-American girl searches her multi-cultural apartment building for a pen in Melissa James Gibson’s Brooklyn Bridge, all while negotiating her emotionally complicated relationship to her mother who is always at work. In Lynn Alvarez’s Esperanza Rising, a twelve-year-old Mexican girl leaves her mother to work in California in the 1930s, where she takes a passive role in the fledgling labor movement and experiences first-hand anti-Latino bigotry. And an African-American mother and daughter take in a Somali refugee in Kia Corthron’s Snapshot Silhouette. All of these plays are written by adults, so their representativeness of the concerns of today’s youth is questionable, but if they are good representations, then they bring up two compelling issues. They would indicate that today’s youth are actively negotiating an increasingly multi-cultural world (which makes sense), and that they are troubled by a notable absence of parents caused by a priority of work over family, or by broken families period.

What do I make of these plays? I find Brooklyn Bridge to be the most compelling. Gibson’s lyricism and poignant humor tell the story of multi-culturalism and parental absence in America with a force that none of the others seem to be able to muster. Average Family is moving on the page, but I wonder how it plays. The concept seems contrived and execution heavy-handed, but perhaps that’s an effective way to tell this story to non-indigenous youth. Even if it works, the happy ending tells a false story. As much as we are getting back now in our Native Renaissance, we Indians haven’t had any clear and decisive victories. To have the redneck Monroes win the reality show would not only be accurate, but it would be troubling. And kids need to know that the good guys don’t always win, and that there’s nothing fair about warfare in general and certainly nothing fair about Indian/Euro-American wars in particular. Esperanza Rising is a competent and theatrical play, but one that I find non-remarkable. It seems that Alvarez has sprawling ambitions with this story, and there’s so much that it could be: it could be a melodrama, a portrait of a historical moment, a love story between Miguel and Esperanza, a coming of age story, a celebration of a mother’s love, or a political portrait of American oppression of Latino immigrants. It starts to be all of these things, but finishes the job with none of them. Snapshot Silhouette is well-written and exciting, but the scenic details that Corthron writes makes it seem like it almost wants to be a movie instead of a play. More importantly, I don’t buy the Somali protagonist Najma’s eloquence in English. I buy that she is in intelligent girl, and eloquent in languages she speaks, but she is the only student in the ESL class who doesn’t seem to need to be there. If that’s intentional on Corthron’s part, then she needs to further with it and actually make the point. If not, she needs to tone back Najma’s mastery of English. And yet, so much of the play rides on Najma’s lines, to do so would slow the story down. Either way it’s a loss.

Is The Face of America an interesting anthology that asks significant questions about today’s youth? Certainly. Is it rife with plays that I would want to see, or perhaps produce? No. Brooklyn Bridge is a stand-alone tour de force sandwiched between three perhaps unfinished plays.

Eyewitness at Wounded Knee

2011-09-29T05:28:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago was the centennial of the Wounded Knee Massacre. That year, a group of scholars were preparing a book to tell the story of the Massacre the way it happened to dispel the myths that had grown up surrounding it. This year, the University of Nebraska Press has reprinted Richard E. Jensen, R. Eli Paul and John E. Carter’s Eyewitness at Wounded Knee. The addition to the ten year old book is Heather Cox Richardson’s introduction, detailing the history of the book itself.

Eyewitness is three chapters, one by each of the authors. The historical text is fascinating but dry. It describes in detail the events leading up to the Massacre, the Massacre itself, and then the immediate fall-out. What the text misses is the raw humanity of two antagonistic groups exploding into wanton violence when a spark accidentally ignites the powder in Black Coyote’s gun. But the text isn’t the focal point of this book. It merely serves to contextualize the photos.

Eyewitness at Wounded Knee is a book of photographs documenting the Massacre, both the situation leading up to it and the carnage afterwards. There are no photos of the violence itself. The photographers on the scene, who would later profit from the images, either ran when violence broke out or took part in the shooting of Big Foot’s Sioux. This is where the book wrenched my gut. Who can look at those mangled bodies, propped up and staged by the photographers, without feeling sick? Those same photographers who contributed to the atmosphere of paranoia between whites and Indians with their yellow journalism, and who recorded for posterity the wretchedness of the United States’ violence against Indians.

"Coyote Hunts the Sun" Interview

2011-09-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill Vol. 1: First Plays/Lost Plays

2011-09-26T05:48:00.000-07:00

Leave it to the New York Neo-Futurists to be clever! Their copiously-titled current production stages the stage-directions, and only the stage directions, of some of O’Neill’s classic plays. A reader sat dressed in black in the corner and read the stage directions out loud while six performers, dressed in matching gray henleys and black suspenders acted them out. Every cue for motion came directly and unquestioned from the reader, who didn’t hesitate to repeat herself if the performers didn’t perform.

TC&CSDOEOV1FPLP is a full length performance of one of the Neos’ Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (TMLMTBGB) sketches, and, as you might imagine, hilarity ensued. The concept lends itself to wordless physical comedy, and the Neos delivered. While extending any of the TMLMTBGB sketches into a production risks becoming gimmicky, TC&CSDOEOV1FPLP narrowly avoided that trap. To be sure, there’s only so many things you can do to keep acting out one playwright’s stage directions fresh, but the Neos have the stage savvy and the balls to do it. Just when I felt they’d run out of new jokes, they came out of left field with something I hadn’t expected.

On a theoretical note, TC&CSDOEOV1FPLP demonstrates something that I’ve read about as a hallmark of the old avant-garde, and have noticing as an underlying trend in some of the off-off-Broadway plays I’ve seen here in NYC. There’s an interest in deconstructing a classic work of art into its constituent parts, and then staging the part that the primary artist(s) find most intriguing. The practice itself is intriguing to me, and now I’m as curious to stage somebody’s stage directions as I am to stage a film spatially.

Poor Lessing's Almanack

2011-09-25T07:17:00.000-07:00

http://poorlessingsalmanack.wordpress.com/

Last night I went to see a play with my friend Amy Jensen, who got us in for free since she was reviewing it for this new blog. If only I'd known earlier that being a blogger gave me press status! I'm going to have to try to take full financial advantage of this thing in the future.

Anyway, this blog is still in the developmental stage. That means, it's still trying to grow a following, and perhaps decide what it's going to be. My blog is also in this stage, in that I check the Stats bar pretty regularly to see what people are responding to. "Poor Lessing's Almanack" has a key difference from "Kachakâach": while my blog is the musings of just me, "PLA" is a collaborative effort of several professional dramaturgs, many of whom seem to adhere to the traditional American definition of the job: they do research for plays and stuff. It also seems to be tending heavily towards reviews of plays that the contributors see. In that respect, it seems that "PLA" and "Kachakâach" are heading in similar directions. I look forward to seeing what comes of this new blog.

The Continuing Saga of "Coyote Hunts the Sun"

2011-09-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

My friend Becky Goldberg has started a playwrighting workshop at SBU where folks who have written stuff get together and hear their work out loud. We've had two sessions, and I've gotten to hear "CHTS" read both times, and the feedback has been tremendously helpful. After our first session, I knew that the several episodes weren't congealing for the listeners. In response, I added back the Storyteller character from earlier drafts, but gave her a definite character. The key scenes for my proto-audiences seem to be the ones with dueling storytelling, and the key theme that of Native people reasserting an autonomous voice. As such, the Storyteller became a clear antagonist in the role of an academic, well-intentioned but speaking out of turn. This second reading made it clear that, as of now, she's troublingly one-sided. What I plan on doing is rewriting her speeches, or "lessons", as lecture notes or lesson plans, as opposed to scripted dialogue. It is also becoming increasingly clear that my play is heavy on visuals, especially towards the top. To really be sure if it works or not, I'm going to have to see it.

Mangled Beams

2011-09-20T07:34:00.000-07:00

The Public needs to produce Dawn Jamieson’s (Cayuga) Mangled Beams, and not just do a reading of it. The reading on September 18^th was fantastic, but I think this play needs to reach a wider audience now.

It’s the story of a group of Mohawk iron workers on 9-11. It’s two acts, the first is in the morning before the attacks, and the second takes place in the days and weeks following the destruction of the Twin Towers. Before the attack, Jamieson introduces us to the characters. There’s Greg (Kaolin Bass), an aspiring Mohawk politician, and his girlfriend Becky (Tanis Parenteau [Creek/Métis]). There’s Jess (Steve Elm [Oneida]), who sells the cigarettes Greg smuggles in for him. And there’s Brad and Dave Martin (Jake Hart [Blackfeet/Cherokee] and Dylan Carusona respectively), two brothers with a rift between them. And of course there’s Sal (Tom Thornton), the racist Italian foreman. Jamieson uses the first act to introduce us to this group and to build up our investment in the characters. It ends with Becky running in telling them that a plane just flew into the Twin Towers.

The second act is about their trials and travails cleaning out the wreckage of the Pile. Their true colors come out. You find out who the real slime balls are, and you get to see the people who have been run over by life take control of themselves. The play ends on a surprisingly uplifting note, showing us through Brad that healing for NYC is possible.

So why does the Public need to produce it, other than that it’s a really really good play? Because the Mohawk ironworkers who risked and lost their lives cleaning out the Pile deserve the recognition. Because, on the train ride home, I struck up a conversation with a total stranger about it, and he didn’t even know that the Mohawks had more or less built New York City, let alone anything about their contributions to the relief efforts. Too many people think that Indians are such a small minority isolated to rural reservations that we have no impact on day to day life in the rest of

America

. New Yorkers and the world need to know about the heroism and bravery of the Native iron workers who helped build this city and to heal it on its darkest day.

The Passion Project

2011-09-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

Last Friday night I got to see Reid Farrington’s Passion Project at 3LD in the Financial District, an explosion of Carl Dreyer’s classic film Passion of Joan of Arc into a spatial performance.

There are three different prints and partial prints of the film. Farrington began this project by juxtaposing them: watching them simultaneously side by side. When we first entered the space, he had them playing on the wall. When the performance itself started, we moved into the second half of the room in which he’d constructed a ten-by-ten room of ropes and wood-and-canvas panels. He’d covered the walls around the space with coffee sacks. The performer, Laura K. Nicoll, entered the space dressed as Joan of Arc and manipulated the panels while the film played all around her. Her manipulation of the projection surfaces allowed Farrington to recreate the movie spatially in such a way that each of the characters appeared where the actor would have stood in the set, all in relationship to the two Joans: the projected Maria Falconetti and her breathing doppelganger Nicoll.

After the show, the friend who I went with asked Farrington about what using all three prints in the spatial part of the experience added to the performance? He answered that it allowed him to show all three in sequence without looping. I didn’t find that answer particularly satisfying. I’m not a film guy, but it seemed to me that he could have done the same thing with just one print. My impression of the Project was that it was really two different ways of exploring the same film, and both of them were interesting but not dependent on each other. The first was the juxtaposition of the three prints side-by-side, and the second was to play it as a spatial performance. I found the first interesting, and the second inspiring. I’m curious now to try to do the same thing with a different film. Preferably one that’s short and that I can get the rights to.

John A. Strong's "Unkechaug Indians"

2011-09-19T06:41:00.000-07:00

John A. Strong, a history professor at Long Island University, is a real blessing for the Long Island Algonquians. This work is very similar to his earlier book on the Montauketts in both form and structure. The initial chapter is a cursory pre-contact history of the tribe, and the bulk of the book is a detailed description and analysis of the tribe’s historical and modern relationship with the United States. Both have the stated or implied intent to argue for tribal sovereignty in the American court system.

This book, on the Unkechaugs of the Poospatuck reservation, stems from a court case in which Strong appeared as an expert witness in favor of the tribe. The case was Gristede’s Foods, Inc. v. Unkechaug Indian Nation: Gristede’s sought to sue the Unkechaugs for untaxed tobacco sales by calling into question their sovereignty in the eyes of New York State and the federal government. The court placed the burden of proof on the Unkechaug Nation to prove that they were, in fact, sovereign by the federal government’s definition. With the help of John A. Strong and the in depth research that he has now published in this book, they did.

I like this book, and I’m a little jealous that the Montauketts and Unkechaugs have such in depth pieces of scholarship that strengthens their tribal identity in the eyes of state and national governments that may question it. When I bought the book at the Unkechaug tent at the Shinnecock Powwow, the man (Tony) I talked to about it really lit up with pride that his tribe has this book. It seems that it has the potential to augment tribal identity within the Unkechaug community as well.

I would like for my tribe to have a book like this one: a book that focuses on our legal relationship with the United States. Especially in light of Lyng v. NICPA, where the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can invade and desecrate our sacred places in the mountains with even the flimsiest of excuses, such a book seems needed. To the best of my understanding, the U.S. Forest Service controls 90 or 95% of our ancestral territory, including our places in the mountains. We have no treaty with the United States, and no other legal cessation of that territory that I know of. A book formatted like Strong’s (except titled The Karuk Indians of Northwest California) that laid out in legal terms the illegality or legality of the United States de facto control of our country would strengthen our position when we need to fight for our country again. It could even help to overturn or invalidate Lyng v. NICPA. What Strong is doing for the Long Island Indians we need back home in NW California.

Eyes of an Angel

2011-09-09T13:46:00.000-07:00

I can sing!

Arvel Bird and Plastic Shamanism

2011-09-07T06:45:00.000-07:00

This Labor Day weekend, I went to the Shinnecock Powwow on Long Island where I got to hear Arvel Bird play during the dinner break for the dancers, and can that man play the fiddle! Other parts of his act left me uneasy, especially when he launched into telling the audience about the teachings of buffalo, “who were sacred to all Native Americans.” My first thought was, “Bull puckey! We’ve never even had buffalo at home.” My second thought was that it was pretty audacious of him to be saying that at a Long Island Indian powwow, where they also have never had buffalo.

Still, I loved his music, so I bought one of his new CDs, Storyteller. In it, he professes teachings of a slough of different animals from around the States. As I listened, it struck me that Arvel Bird is acting a lot like what we call a plastic shaman, or someone who profits off pseudo-Indian religion.

Lisa Aldred, in her article for the American Indian Quarterly 24.3 “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances” sums up what it means to be a plastic shaman: treating Native religion or spirituality as a commodity. Bird does this by professing his own version of Native American spirituality in a product that he sells.

Notice how I referred to what he professes as a version of “Native American” spirituality, rather than specifying a tribe or community? Bird draws on animals from all over the continent. Some, like the dolphin, are certainly not indigenous to his Southern Paiute country. Jack Norton, in his essay Ridge Walkers of Northwestern California, describes exactly what Bird is doing in his CD:

“Although today many have begun an exploration of sustaining relationships within the patterns of life, there are some that have often arbitrarily grabbed bits and pieces of ritual, colorful paraphernalia in a ‘New Age’ of understanding. Their experimentation and eclecticism often feeds egotistical needs without balancing forces of tradition arising from the community and its related space.” (152)

Bird even goes so far as to bring elements of Asian religions into his “Native American” teachings of blue heron. His “

Red Road

” is not rooted in any indigenous tradition and only serves to further confuse those who already have but a tenuous bond with their ancestral society.

One of the major reasons that many Native people object so strongly to the cultural appropriations committed by New Agers like Bird is that they trivialize our ethnic religions. In my people’s Mountain Dance, certain plants and animals have teachings for us. They are a part of our homeland, our ancestral ecosystem; they are always there for us to teach us about our religion, Mountain Dance. Some people may have personal relationships with specific Ikxaréeyavs, or spirituals, some of whom are human and some of whom are not. These partnerships are initiated by the Ikxaréeyav, and are, again, deeply rooted in our regional and ancestral community. But to hear Bird tell it, spirit helpers are like the Zodiac: if you have this kind of personality, then you might have this kind of animal as your totem. What is a deeply personal and special thing for me as a High Dance person and perhaps for other Native’s still rooted in their ancestral homes and religions becomes a plaything of the homeless and disposed in Arvel Bird’s Storyteller.

Works Cited

Aldred, Lisa. “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality.” American Indian Quarterly 24.3. Found in

Native Ways

blog: http://native-way.blogspot.com/2004/10/plastic-shamans.html.

Bird, Arvel. Storyteller. Singing Wolf Records, 2011. Audio CD.

Norton, Jack. “Ridge Walkers of Northwestern California: Paths Towards Spiritual Balance.” Centering in Two Worlds. CARE, 2005. Print.

Tony Platt's "Grave Matters"

2011-09-07T06:35:00.000-07:00

Tony Platt has written, and Heyday Books has published, what I believe to be the latest addition to the new canon of indigenous NW California history, on par with Jack Norton’s Genocide, Byron Nelson’s Our Home Forever, and Thomas Buckley’s Standing Ground. Grave Matters is a sensitive and thorough look at grave robbery in NW California, specifically at the Yurok village of O-pyúweg on Big Lagoon.

This story is a personal one for Platt: an English transplant to Berkeley, he made Big Lagoon his vacation getaway. As vacation getaways do, it became the home where his heart is, and where his family’s hearts are. When his son passed, Platt gave him a Viking funeral on the lagoon, and shortly thereafter became aware of the Yurok Tribe’s and Big Lagoon Rancheria’s interest in guarding a site near his cabin as an ancestoral cemetary. What began as a personal journey of curiosity for Platt became this important book.

He begins with the history and historiography of NW California. He describes the genocide that has been treated in more detail by other authors and then gives a thorough description of the pre-1960s historiography of that genocide: namely, to cover it up. The genocide part is always hard to read about or hear about, but it’s important for those outside of our communities to know that California’s a state soaked in blood. The historiography is also important as it exposes the way the dominant culture socialized and normalized racism against Native Californians. This sets the ground for the real topic of Platt’s book: grave robbery.

He describes how the looting of Indian graves was and is incumbent on objectifying Native people. This reduction of us to the objects of scientific inquiry is only made possible by the above historiography of Manifest Destiny and racial eugenics. It is only countered by the same kind of event that makes this book possible: a sense of camaraderie of humanity between people of different backgrounds and home countries. The similarities between Platt and the local Yurok’s connection to Big Lagoon, and the Red Power movement’s slogan “dig up your own dead” are intimately related. Every culture has a relationship to death in how they let the dead go, and also how they remain close to those who have gone on before.

The story continues with the Red Power movement and our own NICPA, headed up by Milton Marks and Walt Lara, Sr., and the remarkable progress that has been made towards protecting our ancestors’ graves. I found it very interesting that, while AIM and other Indian activist groups arose to combat a myriad of social injustices, Indian activism at home (and the ensuing cultural Renaissance) center around our spiritual sites. After the hard history that we’ve had, the ‘60s came like a breath of fresh air (in this book, and I’m sure in real life, too).

Platt finishes his book looking towards the future. The progress has been immense, but there is nothing to guarantee that the gains we have made with the U.S. government will stick. We know from the Lyng v. NICPA decision that the government can justifying desecration of our sacred places with a whim, and that the federal government clearly favors Christian groups over Native spirituality (Sandra Day O’Connor references three cases in her majority opinion: two involve marginal Christian groups, and the third involves an Indian religion. In the two cases between Christian groups and the government, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the religious group, while in Lyng and the other Native case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government). Platt looks to Germany for advice: how has their country acknowledged and memorialized the Holocaust? And he looks closer to home as well in how the U.S. memorializes the horrors of slavery. The final question in Grave Matters is how can we in California memorialize our Native dead and how can we publicly and monumentally acknowledge the genocide that was perpetuated against us?

News from Native California

2011-08-25T12:14:00.000-07:00

I pulled into the house on Long Island yesterday, and got to see what kind of mail had arrived for me, since I guess I’m just not the type to forward it or have the post office hold it. I was happy to have my very own copy of News from Native California’s latest issue!

The drive back here was nostalgic and a little bit hard. Around the Fallen Timbers Battleground, I thought, “Shoot! I’m going the wrong way! I should be going west!” And when I arrived on the Island, I looked through the some people’s windshields and saw the misery on their faces. They were miserable where they were, and in a hurry to get someplace else. I thought “Shoot! (I always think ‘shoot,’ never ‘shit’) I’ve done that here before! Well no more. I’m going to have fun, gosh darn it!” Part of staying strong and being able to continue to have fun, for me, is holding onto Mountain Dance.

Margaret Dubin, in her “Editor’s Notes,” notes that “…until I typed up the table of contents for the summer issue, I didn’t realize how heavy it was on the arts!...And to be honest, what you see in the next forty-six pages is an accurate representation f what is going on in our community.” If you look closely, much of the art, from my friend Nisha Supahan’s Etsy site to the relaunching of Tongva canoes to Stephen Meadows’ new book of poems, involves re-creating our traditions and the teachings of our ancestors in a world many of them could never have imagined. Throughout California, it’s our adherence to our ancestral cultures that keeps us strong. And nothing creates more of a crux for our cultural revivals than our ceremonies. They create hubs where we can see the artwork of our ancestors and contemporaries, where we can hear the songs, where we can network with each other and create relationships that we will maintain throughout the year to revive our languages, create artwork for regalia and for sale, and (for me) to tell our stories.

Margaret is right: a focus on Native Californian arts is a good way to look at us. I would add that if you want to know what state Native California is in, look at our ceremonies.

Dream of a Broken Field

2011-08-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

And I'm back from Mountain Dance and my drive back to Long Island! While at Dance, I packed along Diane Glancy's new book, Dream of a Broken Field. For those of you who don't know, Diane is a Cherokee writer with a stellar reputation in the world of Native dramaturgy. She is also a sweet lady. I had the pleasure of working with her at Native Voices' playwrights' retreat, and I remember vividly listening to her at a talk-back on her play. In the most dulcet, grandmotherly tones you can imagine, she responds to a comment with, "I love hopelessness and despair."

Anyway, I read her new book at Mountain Dance. It's either a poetry anthology dressed up as a memoir, or a memoir dressed up as a poetry anthology. As I read it, I couldn't help but notice the differences between us. She's a Christian Cherokee from Kansas who has grandkids, has published books and produced plays, who grew up in a different time than me. I'm a Karuk boy who never has more fun than when I'm singing in Mountain Dance. There are similarities: we're both cross-country drivers, for instance. And we're both writers. So as a sat on the point at Amaikiaraam looking across the river, I pulled my notebook out and penned a little poem of my own:

What does it mean to be an Indian?
Diane Glancy is a Kansas Cherokee. She's a Christian and lives in a world of wide open spaces - biting monotony in which the minutiae of variation stand as clear as an Israeli ruin.
I'm a Karuk. I dance in our Mountain Dance. My world is one of rugged mountains and steel gray oceans - a world sharp as flint and nurturing in its violence.
We both find stories in places. We sojourn, hunting for stories, and we tell the ones we find.
Is an Indian a walker between worlds?

A Story as Sharp as a Knife

2011-08-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a minor movement amongst non-Native academics with a passion for Indianess to work towards a Native canon (comparable to the Western canon), and I love it! It is an interesting and (I feel) necessary direction for American academia, and I’m glad that every new book on Indian subject matter by a white academic has had this as a dominant theme.

Bringhurst’s A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World is not exactly new: it was originally published by Douglas & McIntyre in 1999, but it has been reprinted this year with a new “Prologue.” In it, Bringhurst takes into account the controversy that the original print caused. In A Story, Bringhurst defines and treats the Haida oral literature as poetry and compares it to Europe’s epic poetry, as well as Renaissance painting. According to Bringhurst, some Haidas themselves objected to defining their oral literature in European terms. I do sympathize with this position, and to some extent, I share it. Our art should be defined by ourselves as well as outsiders on our terms. To use a Karuk example, why say “folktale” or “myth” when one can use the correct word “pikva?”

On the other hand, Bringhurst is a student of Haida stories and endeavors to understand them with the language he has been taught. That language is, apparently, an erudite literacy in European-based art forms. While one may make a truer approach to these Haida stories by describing them with Haida words and ideas, Bringhurst’s approach brings out is part of what seems to be an academic movement to incorporate Native literatures on the same level as European-based literatures. And, if we stand for decreased marginalization of Native people (and I certainly do), we must judge endeavors like Bringhurst’s in a favorable light.

I would like to propose an addition to the work that Bringhurst and Brehm have done: both of these students of Indian literatures consider the art as writing and as literature. However, writing is a very recent phenomenon in the lives of these stories, and has been both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in that it has preserved some of our ancestors’ words that would otherwise have been lost. It’s a curse that it has relegated a living breathing thing to the silent stillness of the page. Our stories are only very recently books. What they have been, and what they need to be again, are performances. Our stories need life-breath to be told.

Pirates of Penzance

2011-07-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

Every single boy wants to be a pirate when he grows up, and most of the girls too. The reasons are compelling: Peter Pan, Treasure Island, Pirates of the Caribbean these days. And of course the immortal Pirates of Penzance, which is currently playing on OSF’s Elizabethan stage come fair weather or foul.

I got to see Pirates on a rainy night in July (it’s a really weird year, even for Oregon), and not only was it a success, but I want to be a pirate even more than I did before the show. Director Bill Rauch embraced Gilbert and Sullivan’s use of pop-culture reference and unrestrained silliness by infusing their hundred-year-old operetta with some of the popular music styles that have come since then: gospel, British-invasion rock ‘n’ roll, and rap (the police officers do a little rap). Early in the show, Eddie Lopez (who plays Frederick) was standing alone on stage when the rain really started to dump. He tossed his head back and looked straight into the sky. I knew somebody at some point during the show they would have to acknowledge the rain, since it was on everybody’s mind. I don’t know if I was reading Eddie’s mind, or if he was reading mine, but he burst out into an impromptu “Singing in the Rain,” while shooting a guilty “is this okay?” look at the conductor. It was. It brought the house down.

Bill Rauch’s attraction to fun is a real jolt of positive energy for OSF, and they need it this year with the Bowmer almost falling down. His sense of play is a perfect match for this old musical and brings out the best in it and in the splendid cast he’s got performing it. It deserves a rain-drenched standing ovation, and a hearty “Yo ho ho!”

A Rough Chester Pepper Translation

2011-07-19T09:02:00.000-07:00

As part of my work on dramatizing "Coyote Hunts the Sun," I've been trying to expose myself to every version of that story I can lay my hands on. I found a recording that Bill Bright made of Chester Pepper telling it - interestingly, it's a different version than the one Bright translated for his Dictionary. That they were different was all I could tell just listening to it, so I sat down with the cassette in my tape recorder, a Word document open on my laptop, and both Karuk dictionaries open on my lap. I worked through it line by line, trying to tell what Chester was saying and then rendering it into English so I could tell what was going on. Here is my very rough translation (the numbers on the first section correspond to the time marker on my tape recorder):

56. Pihnêefich úum ‘ukúphaanik.

Coyote it he-did-anciently.

Coyote did it.

57. Vúra ‘xúti pa kúusrah u’ahoo thírav.

(emphatic) He-thinking the sun he-walks to trail [like a deer]

He thinks, “I’ll trail the sun where he walks!”

58. Ma’ pa ta súpaah tur (váa tur pa vásih)

Uphill the (perfective) day pack [wood] (he pack the back)

Uphill the day packs wood, he packs it on his back.

59. Kumâam vúra hôoy poo’aramsîiprivtih (tur vásih)

It-a-little-ways-uphill (emphatic) where no-comes-from (pack back)

But it doesn’t come from a little ways uphill, where it’s packing!

60. Xas xuti

Then thinks

Then he thinks

Kíri váa kari uum

I-wish he still arrive

“I wish he’d still arrive.”

61. Pukára kúusrah úuyroov ánsim

Nobody sun mountain-upriver go-to-bed

Nobody was the sun so he went to sleep in the upriver mountains

62. Ta mukfúukraa

(perfective) his-climbing-up-from-downhill

He climbs up the hill.

Vúra kaan úum maruk fúku

(emphatic) there he uphill climbs

He climbs uphill there.

63. Yee yáxa sáruk kari vásih pa kus’

Well look downhill still back the sun

Well look downhill: it’s still the sun’s back.

Pa kum pa’ahoo

The some the-walk

He travels on.

64. Koovúra váa kaan uum

All he there arrive

He arrives there.

Kumisha xas ta vásih pa kus’

It’s-water then (perfective) back the sun

It’s water and he still sees the sun’s back.

65. Nu vêen vura vêetshiip tu páapvuuy tu xuti nu amvaan mûuk aramsîiprivtih

We pray (emphatic) start-to-attack (perfective) the-tail (perfective) thinks we eater with starting-out

We pray that the tail we think to catch and eat will start out!

66. Vura vaa pihnêefich ukúpanik. That’s all. Vaa vura kich.

(Emphatic) he coyote he-did-anciently. That’s all. It’s (emphatic) over.

Coyote did it. That’s all.

1. Coyote did it.

2. He thinks, “I’ll trail the sun where he walks!”

3. The day packs uphill: he packs it on his back.

4. But it’s not just a little ways up the hill, where he’s packing!

5. Then he thinks,

6. “I wish he’d still arrive.”

7. Nobody there on the mountain upriver was the sun so he went to sleep.

8. He climbs up the hill.

9. He climbs up the hill there.

10. Well look downhill: it’s still the sun’s back.

11. He travels on.

12. He arrives there.

13. He’s at water and still he sees the sun’s back.

14. We pray that the tail we think to catch and eat will start out!

15. Coyote did it. That’s all.

How to Be An Effective Dramaturg

2011-07-18T09:19:00.000-07:00

My friend Casey Faubion has been trying to establish a quasi-dramaturgical department at Camelot Theatre in Talent, OR – or at least to develop the role of the dramaturg at Camelot – and as part of that he invited Martine Green to give a talk on “How to Be an Effective Dramaturg” at Camelot. Martine is a mid-career ‘turg currently working at OSF. Her three-hour talk was nicely organized into two-parts (leave it to a dramaturg to instinctively give an informal lecture a pleasing structure).

In her first half, she went over David Copelin’s “Ten Dramaturgical Myths.” I’ve listed them below with my own thoughts on what Martine said.

1. “Literary managers and dramaturgs tell playwrights how to rewrite their plays.”

While some bad ones might, I already knew from my work at SBU and Native Voices that the good ones don’t.

2. “Since dramaturgs have raised staged readings to an art form, playwrights have been encouraged to develop their plays to death.”

I’ve heard this before. Martine made an interesting point about following the organic growth of a play. You can tell when a script can’t benefit from any more workshops. Then it’s time to start looking for a place to get it a production, at least so the playwright can see what it’s like on its feet.

3. “Literary managers and dramaturgs function as ‘objective voices’ in rehearsal.”

Can any human being really be objective? Don’t we all see the world through the lenses we’ve developed by living? Martine says we’re supposed to be a “creative informed objective voice.” I like that.

4. “As intellectuals, literary managers and dramaturgs want to replace warm human emotions in the theatre with cold abstract ideas.”

I know I like to be an emotional vampire in rehearsal. Just kidding, I like to be focused on making a fun experience for the audience. Martine says that part of the blame goes to the academic institutions that train dramaturgs to focus more on theory than on production. Not all of them do, but none of them should. I think priority should go towards putting plays up, and only theorize about them later.

5. “Literary managers and dramaturgs are no more than powerless, stage-struck ‘Ph.D. gofers’ with no real artistic talents of their own, reduced to working as underpaid readers and clerks.”

No, because a good ‘turg has to have an artistic instinct and a feel for the theater.

6. “Dramaturgs interfere with the ‘natural’ relationship between the director and the playwright (of a new play), and between the director and the text (of an older work).”

Our jobs are to help facilitate that interaction, all the time looking out for the story that the primary artist (be they director or playwright) wants to tell. As Lue Douthit says, we’re the “keepers of the story.”

7. “Literary managers and dramaturgs don’t like most American theatre the way it is. They want our scripts and productions to be more theatrical, more resonant, less naturalistic, less trivial, more aware of the world, better. Can’t they appreciate how wonderful things are?”

No. There’s always room for improvement, and if things stay the way they are, that means American theater has gone stagnant.

8. “Literary managers and dramaturgs are just critics in very thin disguise. They’re not ream players, they have little sense of performance, and they’re always demanding instant results.”

Maybe the bad ones. A good dramaturg should be a team player and they should have a great sense of performance.

9. “Dramaturg is such an ugly word.”

Yep. I want to be called “Guardian of the Dionysian Mysteries.”

10. “There will always be literary managers, because someone has to read all those plays, but dramaturgy is a nasty fad that will go away.”

Not exactly, because somebody always has to keep the story. But it’s true that theaters are cutting literary departments like it’s going out of style. Martine gives it maybe two years before only a few special companies like OSF have a staff of actual dramaturgs.

So that was the first half! During the second half, Martine talked about her process of doing production dramaturgy. She talked about note-giving etiquette, which I’m already figuring out pretty quickly on my own. She also talked about the forms she gives her protocols. They’re definitely different from Steve Marsh’s five-part binders. She puts a clean copy of the script, her marked up copy, and other editions of it in her binders. She also creates a glossary based on the questions she has on her second read. I liked hearing about her tricks and am already using them. She showed us OSF’s copy of Love’s Labors Lost which has the Quarto, Folio, and production copies of the scripts juxtaposed line-by-line next to each other. I just did that this morning with the different versions of “Coyote/Cottontail Hunts the Sun,” the dramatization of this Karuk/Yurok/Northern Paiute myth I’m working on!

Love's Labours Lost

2011-06-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

I spent last Sunday night swathed in the fragrance of blooming roses, lost in the pageantry of love’s sweet delight. And that was only before 11:00, while I was watching OSF’s production of Love’s Labours Lost!

Shakespeare wrote a linguistic feast, and the Festival has given us a surfeit of visual beauty as well. I’ve always found Shakespeare’s poetry in this play like walking through a rose garden, and it’s as if I found my psychological twin in scenic designer Christopher Acebo! He filled the space with roses: they grew out of the stage, they drifted from the sky. Thanks to costumer Christal Weatherly, they even emanated from the characters! OSF’s Love’s Labours Lost is a pageant of poetry, both aural and visual!

“Pageant,” incidentally, is one of those words that bring out the dramaturg in me. If I were a Soviet sleeper spy, it would be the word that activates my mission to overthrow capitalist empires or something. So let’s talk a little about pageants.

There are places that Love’s Labours Lost is a sleeper, and not of the Cold War espionage variety. Those places are where Shakespeare uses stage techniques that resonated with his audience, but are foreign for us. The masque and allegorical presentation of the Nine Worthies were entirely familiar to 16^th Century Brits. They were used to miracle and mystery plays that presented Bible characters and allegories of different vices and virtues. And they were generally fun! Imagine a life with no TV, no internet, hardly any books. You spend your day breaking your back in a field, or making gloves in a poorly-lit room surrounded by the smell of other people’s shit. Your entertainment is Christian mass and miracle and mystery plays. Your attention span is longer since you don’t have Youtube, and you want to spend as much time watching spectacles as possible anyway before you get back to your miserable life where you only bathe once a year.

It’s kind of fun to imagine, but it’s not our culture. The pageantry we’re used to is J-Pop and The Nutcracker. So while the audience my have been thinking about whether or not they remembered to call the dog sitter during the girls’ little joke on the boys, and what kind of ice-cream they ought to buy after the show during the Nine Worthies, they were there and enjoying it when Dumaine (John Tufts) started singing and dancing his love letter, and they were practically clapping along when the boys came out dressed as Muscovites to Tschaikovsky’s familiar strains.

Is Love’s Labours Lost a labour to behold, hopelessly dated and fit only for the most self-despising culture vulture? No! It’s a beautiful play, as beautiful as an evening walk in a blooming rose-garden. It certainly has potential to become dramatic drivel on stage, but in the hands of OSF’s expert artists, Shakespeare’s poetry lives and breaths and engages our 2011 audience as much as a four-hundred year old play can.

Star Stories and Water Spirits

2011-06-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

Who are we without the land we live in? Victoria Brehm’s sprawling new anthology of Native literature from the Great Lakes posits the answer “Nothing.”

Brehm’s book reads as if edited by an academic (which, of course, it is), but it retains accessibility to the general population. For an Indian from outside the Great Lakes region, it seems significant, and I imagine it could be so for Great Lakes Indians as well. However, the social event she is responding to is the Eurocentric emphasis in Canadian and American literature departments. As she states in her introduction:

“Education is not only about knowledge, but socialization and power as well. For Canada and the United States to respect Native literatures as classics equally with Greek and Latin would require a realignment of values and a recognition of past brutalities that few are prepared to make. Yet Native stories are as important to the residents of North America as Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Homer. Of all the miracles North America has been granted – a richly endowed continent, technological prowess, and political stability – the endurance of this literature must be ranked as one of the most fortunate.” (23)

Brehm has identified a problematic issue and taken a very academic approach towards it: she published a book. As academia seems to be her primary (if not her only) target, a book might be a useful tool. I do contend that for all its voluminous girth, it is clear and accessible to the general public. She structures it around the four seasons in reflection of the rhythms of indigenous lives reflecting those of the natural world. And she includes literature from ancient legends to the writings of contemporary Great Lakes Native artists.

If academia reflects the social values of the dominant culture (the general public, if you will), then her focusing of an academic technique on an academic failure should have positive repercussions outside of the universities. And I hope it does. After all, it is the general public is who we need to recognize our continued presence on this continent, and to recognize that a culture of detachment from place will leave none of us with a home.

Imaginary Invalid

2011-06-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

Moon boots! ‘Fros! Bell-bottoms! Molière!

OSF premieres a new adaptation of the classic Imaginary Invalid that really got my groove and flipped my funk. Director Tracy Young was searching for a concept to slap onto the Molière’s play – something integrating “the populist aspects of commedia and the over-the-top gilding of the French Baroque.” She says she “landed” on French pop music from the sixties, but what she really did (she and her co-adaptor Oded Gross) was fly.

The set was clean – it set us in upper class Paris – but it did not prepare us for what happened at 8:30.

At 8:30 the ensemble came out dressed in some of the most fabulously flamboyant costumes I’ve seen at OSF (so a nod to costumer Christopher Acebo is in order). They sang and danced a lively little ditty by Oded, Tracy and Paul James Prendergast that got my feet tapping and me ready to see the show!

Now let’s get sober – this choice was a risk. Whenever a director decides that she needs to have a new setting for every classic play that comes her way, she’s in peril of making something slap-shod and boring. You can have all the eye- and ear-candy in the world and still have a bummer of a show. This Invalid is not stuck in that hospital bed. It wasn’t about taking two things that suggest each other to the director and putting them on stage together – it was hardly intellectual at all (and that’s a good thing – some of the worst plays I’ve seen were still stuck in somebody’s brain). It’s fun. The creative team had fun, the designers had fun, the performers had fun, and so we the audience had a grand old time.

August: Jackson County

2011-06-10T08:44:00.000-07:00

Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County is going viral all over the country, but should it? I wondered if I would get more out of it if I saw it again, in the same way you would expect to get more out of a Shakespeare play when you see it the second and fifteenth times. After all, people seem to be treating August as a new classic.

I can’t see why.

I could complain about the acting. After all, the Old Globe had a stirring class, but OSF’s ensemble fell short of what I’ve come to expect from that company. I am, naturally, thinking of the two productions that I’ve seen a week apart together. The OSF cast was doing everything that actors should: projecting, keeping their cues tight. But it didn’t seem organic. I failed to invest in the characters, and I failed to laugh at their outrageousness. What happened was that they ended up playing it at the same level and tempo throughout the first act, and it was fairly clear to me that they were acting. I should qualify this review right now by saying that I only made it through the first act. I figured if I was going to be bored until midnight, I could at least do it in my bed, asleep.

I could be alone in this. It seems I am: everybody I talk to enthuses about August, and the audience I was a part of was pretty lively. This makes me think that the acting didn’t read as stagey to the rest of the audience as it did to me. They genuinely seemed to be into it. So why wasn’t I? Could it be that I just heard these jokes a week ago, and so they seemed old? And if that’s the case, then it tells me that August is superficial: there’s nothing under the surface.

Others disagree with that opinion. Director Christopher Liam Moore indicates in his program note that he’s fascinated by the focus on family. He posits that “there is a little bit of the Westons in each of our families.” But if this were the case, then I should be able to invest a little bit more. As it turns out, I just have no reason to care about a dysfunctional white family living in Oklahoma, especially one that parades its exaggerated extremities in front of me for three and a half hours.

Native Voices Playwrights' Retreat 6-4-2011

2011-06-05T07:24:00.001-07:00

Native Voices Playwrights' Retreat 6-3-2011

2011-06-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

Native Voices Playwrights' Retreat 6-2-2011

2011-06-03T07:39:00.000-07:00

August: Osage County

2011-06-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

Jerry Springer, meet Tracy Letts. You two should have a lot to talk about – you both have a penchant for dysfunctional white families.

But seriously, the Old Globe performance of August: Osage County was an absolute delight as far as production goes. Kimberly Guerrero gave my spine a shudder the way she stared (spoiler alert!) at Angela Reed after Angela’s character Barbara struck her child. And Lois Markle owned the role of Violet and the Old Globe! That woman has a pair of pipes that can fill up the theater and suck all the energy to her. That’s what Violet does: she sucks all the energy out of everybody in the house and makes them as miserable as she is.

And Sam Gold’s direction took me on a journey! They played for laughs in the first two acts, and laugh I did. Not even Jerry or Maury can get the same kinds of hearty guffaws and mischievous chuckles out of an audience. The third act was an about-face. It all of a sudden got pretty serious. Unfortunately, it was too long. I was with them up through the point that (spoiler alert!) Bill leaves with Jean. That seemed like the ending, and I was surprised when they kept going. I didn’t get back into it again until Violet told Ivy (played by Carla Harting; also, this is another spoiler) that she was banging her brother. If it hadn’t been for the middle of the third act, the entire event would have been an incredible journey. As it was, it was an incredible journey with a disappointing hint of self-indulgence on the part of the playwright.

Now that we’re talking about Tracy Letts again, we’d better address some fundamental issues with his script. His treatment of the Other and Indians seems lazy, which makes his script feel like a Jerry Springer-type attack on a created family, and nothing more. The play is about a dysfunctional white Oklahoma family, but he inserts into their world an Indian. Johnna Monevata seems well-balanced, but is she? The last scene of the Old Globe production made me question why she stays in such a hell. She read like a vulture. But is she? Is that in the script, or just the production? What Tracy does is he introduces two Others for his predominately white audience: the dysfunctional white family, and the Indian. Racially, his audience should feel alienated from Johnna, but psychologically from the Westons. Or should they? Tracy gives himself a lot to work with by picking an Indian as the interloper into the Westons’ world, but he then he gets lazy. Why doesn’t he deal with the Cheyenne’s troubled history in Oklahoma, something that should be on the forefront of all the characters’ minds? More importantly, why doesn’t he delve deeper into the question of the Other, represented in this play by a brutally self-destructive family and by an Indian interloper? By allowing Johnna to be a greater player in this world, rather than the dark-skinned maid servant of traditional colonial theater, he could make this play more than Jerry Springer style sadism. He could make it a play about the role of the Other in modern Indian-white relations, as well as about the Other within ourselves. His play could mean something.

Native Voices Playwrights' Retreat 6-1-2011

2011-06-01T20:32:00.000-07:00

Native Voices Playwrights' Retreat 5-31-2011

2011-05-31T17:52:00.000-07:00

Native Voices Playwrights' Retreat 5-30-2011

2011-05-30T18:56:00.000-07:00

Native Voices Playwrights' Reatreat 5-29-2011

2011-05-29T20:44:00.000-07:00

American Decameron

2011-05-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

Practicing with the Kinect

On May 14^th, I participated as a storyteller and dramaturg in Phillip Baldwin’s American Decameron, held in The Tank on

W 45^th St.

The performance gave me an important insight into what the show really was, as well as confirming several ideas I’ve had floating around about collaborative storytelling.

Jose Ojeda ran music from his laptop at the foot of the stage

American Decameron was Phillip’s take on Boccaccio’s Decameron in which a group of young Florentines, men and women, flee the plague and tell each other stories in a remote villa. American Decameron only did minimal homage to Boccaccio’s poem. We crowd-sourced stories on themes that interest Phillip such as getting out of pink-collared jobs, sex, American society as a pyramid scheme, meeting attractive singles, and so on and so forth through a pair of blogs. He selected some of us to tell stories from the blogs while using a Kinect to VJ stock video and audio on a projection-wall behind us. During the course of the play, we stopped using the Kinect. As it turns out, it was only a distraction from out stories. I suppose it was similar to playing the piano while telling a story – your hands and body act separately from your mouth – but none of us had enough experience with the Kinect to play it while we told our stories. So about half-way through American Decameron became one person after another walking to the front of the stage and telling a story. That tells me that that is what it always was at its core, and the Kinect and the other toys that Phillip insisted on using were only fluff that got in the way of American Decameron being what it really was.

So American Decameron was about stories culled from our blogs, not about the Kinect. I’m not sure that crowd-sourcing through blogs is the best way to gather stories for a theatrical event. Blogs are a way to facilitate minimal communication. For example, I can talk to you through this blog when I choose. But I don’t know who I’m talking to, nor do I necessarily expect a response. I could very well be speaking into a vacuum. Because of my low expectations, you don’t have to respond. Were we speaking in person, I would know who my audience is, and I would expect and probably get a response. A real conversation could happen. These blogs are poor substitutes for conversation. They are helpful, in the case of this blog, when the potential interlocutors may be in the next state, the next time zone, or the next country. But in the case of American Decameron, all of the interlocutors shared a common geographic location at least once a week. The use of blogs and crowd-sourcing actually inhibited the creation of American Decameron.

Warming up with the Kinect and music

A better approach would have been that of classic devising, as I know it from Amy Jensen’s [here now then]. A small group of people meet in the evening and tell each other stories on the themes set out by the director. The director would then guide the ensemble through improvising on those stories to create a single show with a single spine. We would add in toys like the Kinect only if they actively contributed to the spine of the play. We would have known what we had before we were on stage. American Decameron has potential, but only if it ceases to be distracted by new technologies that only serve to cloud what it really is: a storytelling revue based on themes inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron.

Locker No. 417B

2011-05-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

On May 12^th I saw my friend Amy Jensen’s new play, Locker No. 4173B, a New York Neo-Futurist production being held at The Monkey on West 26th Street, for which Amy worked as their dramaturg. It’s playing through May 21^st, and is a thoroughly enjoyable and thought provoking production.

An intersection of archaeology and theater, Locker is the result of Neo-Futurists Christopher Borg and Joey Rizzolo buying a foreclosed storage locker in an auction, and trying to reconstitute, from the stuff in their new property, the lives of those who had lost the locker. They brought their findings to the stage in the form of a docudrama.

Locker is fascinating on many levels: it’s a network of interesting stories, Borg, Rizzolo, and Yeauxlanda Kay performed beautifully, and the list only goes on. I would like to focus on just one aspect of this play: the way it humanizes archaeology, or, more specifically, archaeology’s subjects. The subjects of Borg and Rizzolo’s archaeological endeavor are, most likely, still alive. They may not be, however, and this crisis of ignorance of the current whereabouts of the subject is particularly meaningful from a Native perspective, from the perspective of an archaeological subject. Museums and archaeology, in their fixation on the past, often ignore the living members of their subject group. This oversight, at least in the experience of Native people, leads to the myth of the “vanished Indian” and the feeling I sometimes have that people think we all died at Wounded Knee.

If they are alive, and even if they’re dead, what are the moral implications of this invasion into their privacy? Borg and Rizzolo, and therefore the audience, wrestle with this question as well. At one point, Rizzolo says that a paranoid schizophrenic subject of their theatrical study may not be crazy after all: having her life pored over by a group of strangers in a higher social class is just the sort of thing a paranoid schizophrenic would fear. Later in the show, Rizzolo enters from the coat room with an audience member’s purse. He asks her how she would feel about him rifling through her stuff then and there and showing everybody her possessions. They finished the show by asking us to think about all our possessions – from treasures to junk – and which of those things we would want a stranger to study and judge us by.

Locker No. 4173B was simultaneously awkward and needed. I felt awkward going through strangers’ lives without their permission. But isn’t that the point? The dead and the living are never objects: they are people. Locker gracefully exposes a dehumanizing flaw in the archaeological method, a flaw that we living and marginalized subjects of archaeology, and its cousin anthropology, have been aware of for years. That the New York Neo-Futurists are telling this story to the hip, young and mostly white off-off-Broadway crowd is an exciting step in the right direction.

Something About A Bird

2011-05-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

The winner of Stony Brook’s 8th Annual John Gassner New Play Competition, the reading of which was held on May 11, was Trina Kakacek’s Something About A Bird, a story of a gravely wounded soldier who is fixed up by the government in order to be redeployed. It’s a good story to tell, but the way in which it was told was, to me, alienating, and not in the intentional Brechtian sense.

First, it was poorly read. I’ve seen most of the actors before, and I know they can do better. But they seemed to have low energy, or at least low volume and poor diction. That made Kakacek’s story tedious, but my sense of alienation came from the playwright herself.

While I was waiting for the reading to be over, I asked myself if I ought to stay for the talk-back. I decided against it. The only reason I would have stayed was to voice my opinion on the play. Kakacek, it seemed to me, brings forth some culturally ingrained racism against Indians in Something About A Bird. First, she calls for one of the characters to enter dressed as a “Native American warrior.” “Okay,” I wanted to ask, “is this a Tlingit warrior we’re talking about, or maybe a Lakota? Is this an old timer, or one of the people from the Wounded Knee standoff?” Later she calls for this character to perform a “Native American War Dance.”

Later in the play, one of the characters tells a story about getting splinters all over his back, and his father, night by night, de-splintering a section of his back. While he did this, he compared the splinters he was pulling to Indians. He left a few Indians just as a “souvenir,” to which the other character on stage emotes that he ought to have killed them all. Now this exchange could have been a constructive comparison between American colonialism in America and in Asia, but in light of Kakacek’s prior cultural insensitivity, it just felt nasty.

I ended up not staying since I felt sure people would just think I was being overly sensitive. Was I? I felt alienated, like I was the only Indian in a room full of whites who felt fine about caricaturizing and objectifying me. Was it an over-reaction, or was it a legitimate response to culturally ingrained racism? Ought I have said something?

Reactions to NMAI

2011-04-25T06:34:00.000-07:00

Pathkir

This past week I went to the Museum of the American Indian in the old Customs House on Bowling Green, which was a fascinating learning experience for me. I was walking through their exhibit of the old-time stuff, and it really wasn't striking me in my gut. I did like looking at the Karuk things (like the horseshoe that had basketry on it), and the Plains porcupine quill work was amazing, but I really didn't have an aesthetic reaction to it. But then I got into Preston Singletary's exhibit, and I did react. He's a Tlingit glass blower. He studied in Venice with those master blowers over there, and now he uses Tlingit forms and motifs in his work. He's a cosmopolitan like me: he understands that Indians and whites are foreign to each other only when they say so, but he says different. We both seem to exist and thrive between peoples, and so the differences that a lot of people create don’t seem to make as much sense. And it shows up in his work, like (I expect) it shows up in mine. He keeps his Tlingit forms and his clans' symbols, but he executes them in a European medium, and has trained in Europe. I've trained in predominately white communities (Portland, Munich, New York), and it shows up in my work. I experiment with form and find the continuum between traditional Karuk storytelling and Western dramaturgy. The main mediums, voice and narrative, are the same, but the others I like to play with. My themes and motifs, at least at this point in my career, draw heavily on my Karuk heritage. But I knew all that already, it was just interesting to see a glass blower doing something similar. What I really learned is that I react to art in context. The old-time things were out of context: they're for living and dancing, not for museums. Singletary's art is for galleries and museums. Looking at the old stuff in museums is like seeing brief, isolated images from somebody else's dream, even things like pathkir and Mountain Dance baskets, which I'm entirely familiar with. Their context is in Mountain Dance, and I just couldn't react honestly to them outside of that context.

Karuk horseshoe

Coulombe's "Reading Native American Literature"

2011-04-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

Just in time for college teachers to add it to their fall semester syllabi, Joseph L. Coulombe of Rowan University has published his teaching aid to Native literature. A thorough and respectful survey of his canon of Native novels, "Reading Native American Literature" is a useful textbook for teachers and researchers of the modern Native novel.

Coulombe, a white professor writing for a primarily white, middle-class readership, begins his book with a well-researched and informative history of Native and white relations in the USA, and how our collective Native literature has progressed with that. This provides context for outsiders who are unfamiliar with the place from which many of our authors write. After his historical introduction, Coulombe goes on to survey the canon of Native literature that he teaches in his classes: N. Scott Momaday’s "House Made of Dawn," Leslie Marmon Silko’s "Ceremony," Gerald Vizenor’s "Bearheart," James Welch’s "Fools Crow" and "Heartsong of Charging Elk," Sherman Alexie’s "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," and Linda Hogan’s "Power."

Each of these chapters is a stand-alone critique of the individual texts, making this a perfect book for a scholar or teacher who may be professionally interested in one or two but not all of the books. That is not to say that one can’t read the book cover-to-cover. As "Reading Native American Literature" is a continuation of Coulombe’s classes in Native literature, it would be fascinating to read the books he considers, and then to read his chapter on that book, as if one were taking a class from him. Coulombe has done his reading and knows his stuff, but he approaches the subject of our literature respectfully and gingerly by acknowledging all that he, as an outsider, doesn’t know.

While the books Coulombe considers should be on in any Indian’s and interested non-Indian’s book-shelf, "Reading Native American Literature" is not intended for the lay person. But if your interest in our literature extends past reading it and into the realm of studying it, Coulombe’s new book is worth a read.

Guerilla (Coyote) Theater: Actor's Meeting

2011-03-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

I met with my actors for what I’m calling “Guerilla (Coyote) Theater.” The plan is to tell the traditional Karuk story “How Birds Got Their Feathers” in a guerilla theater/agit-prop format. Depending on how it goes, I would like to use this format as a way to protest for our Native people in California. Goodness knows we have enough to fight for, and if this would help us to simultaneously halt assaults against our lands and traditions, and at the same time educate our own people and outsiders about who we are, then it is a form worth pursuing.

We made some important progress. I brought up my concern that, unless we connected this directly with our audience, it would only read as the theater students being pretentious. So I posed the question, “What is it that has Stony Brook students worked up?” The answer is Andrew Cuomo’s budget cuts. He’s cutting funding from the lower-income people who need it most, and allowing higher taxes for rich people like him to expire. We cast the play with Chris Petty as Coyote, Becky Goldberg as Wren, and Nancee Moes as Kachakâach. We also set a date: May 17th.

Next, I need to draw up a script (which I would like to be more of a commedia-style outline than an actual script), figure out where we are going to do it, and set up a Facebook group to start advertising for it. I’m working with an artist here, Jose Ojeda, to create masks for my actors, and I need to find some kind of a projector to throw Cuomo’s image up on the wall.

Note's on Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth"

2011-03-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

These are my reading notes to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, published in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism in 2010.

“The poverty of the people, national oppression, and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing.” (1441)

Fanon links the indigence of colonized peoples with cultural genocide and with the act of colonization itself. Colonization, or the reduction of a people to a substratum of another people, is the root cause of both these evils. The indigence of the people comes from “exploitation” by the colonizers. All Indian peoples have faced economic exploitation of our lands and resources. For us on the Klamath River, it started as gold, and then timber, and now hydroelectric energy. We also face cultural exploitation in the forms of derogatory images of us in mainstream Western culture, and cultural appropriation by well-meaning but ignorant white people.
We are also exploited as human capital. Part of this process is cultural genocide: “kill the Indian to save the man.” America has no room for Indian people. Unlike the early colonizers (Britain, Spain, France, etc.), America does not have a land base of their own. The United States of America can not exist without our lands and resources. They had the option to coexist with us, but eschewed that in favor of taking everything away from us. This involves either killing us all outright, or destroying our cultural identities. Unlike the early colonizers (Britain, Spain, France, etc.), America does not have a land base of their own. The United States of America cannot exist without our lands and resources. They had the option to coexist with us, but eschewed that in favor of taking everything away from us. This involves either killing us all outright, or destroying our cultural identity.

“On another level, the oral tradition – stories, epics, and songs of the people – which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons.” (1442)

Storytelling is part and parcel of the cultural renaissance that marks the resurgence of a people as a political entity. But the ways in which we tell stories will be different. Under the full weight of colonization, culture “becomes a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress, and a few broken-down institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing of life.” (1441) As we reassert our identities, we heal ourselves individually and socially. One of the hallmarks of a healthy person, I believe, is creativity. If we are all created in the Creator’s image, then it follows that we too are creators. Fanon predicts the colonizer’s reaction to this: “On the whole such changes are condemned in the name of a rigid code of artistic style and of cultural life which grows up at the heart of the colonial system.” (1443) The reaction, then, is to stifle our creativity with such judgments as “That’s not really Indian,” or “That’s not culturally authentic.” But our creations have to change to meet the changes of our environments. At this point in our history we need to tell the stories in English so they’ll be accessible to those of our own people who don’t speak our language, and to communicate amongst each other. This doesn’t mean that linguistic revival isn’t needed or connected to storytelling – it is both of those things. It is simply to say that, at this moment, if we were to only tell our stories in Araarahi in traditional sweathouses and living houses strictly in the winter, then our stories would never be told. The question is how do we tell our stories today?

Native literature as a "minor literature"

2011-03-16T08:04:00.000-07:00

These are my reading notes on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Kafka, found in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

“A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. But the first characteristic of minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a coefficient of deterritorialization.” (1451)

By Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, our Native literatures written in English constitute “minor literature.” I’m curious to what extent our work fulfils their three characteristics of minor literature. The first characteristic is “deterritorialization.” Now, what does that mean? Their case study for Kafka is, believe it or not, Kafka. Kafka was a Czech Jew who wrote in German. The deterritorialization in his case is choosing a foreign language to express himself in, specifically, that of foreign oppressors. It seems that our writers have a similar relationship to English, another language brought to us by foreign oppressors.

“The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political.”

Deleuze and Guattari base the reason for this characteristic on “cramped space.” There are so few venues for us to publish our works that everything that does manage to get out far enough for a wider Indian and white audience to read it must use the opportunity to address the myriad of problems that we face. All of the Native literature that I have read meets this criteria either by trying to educate the dominant culture about us, or by providing us with historic or modern images of ourselves for us to relate to.

“The third characteristic of minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value.” (1452)

This characteristic I take issue with. They follow the above sentence with: “Indeed, precisely because talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective enunciation.” Our problem is certainly not a dearth of talent, but a dearth of opportunities for all that talent to be realized. And it is not the case that we have no masters writers who stand before us as our Native authors. And I feel sure that Deleuze and Guattari don’t consider Kafka talentless. This means that this is an incomplete reading of their third characteristic of minor literatures.

“The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern.”

This, then, is the second part of the “collective” value of minor literature. It is a common platform of discourse that paves the way for revolutionary struggle against the oppressor. Deleuze and Guattari wrote this in 1975, before the rise of social media. Social media, like Facebook and Twitter are the platforms of discourse for the current revolutions in the Arab world. What is our platform of discourse? Pan-Indianism has become a powerful bond between divergent peoples all over the Americas. A language barrier exists along the Rio Grande, but where that barrier is breached, we come together as brothers- and sisters-in-arms in our struggle for self-determination. But how do we communicate across the continent with each other? Powwows and other ceremonies are too localized. The internet (and electricity) are spotty if not absent in many places on the River, and I imagine in many rezes, rancherias and pueblos, so social media is only realistic amongst urban Indians like me (and probably most of the Indians that read this). Print publication has become too slow – the Egyptian revolution couldn’t have been organized through a newspaper. Is there a way for us to communicate and organize with each other, at least throughout Anglophone America?