TRUTH, RECONCILIATION and RESISTANCE: Ceremonial Performativity and Native Aesthetics in Native Theater (original) (raw)

In 2015, indigenous theater artists gathered together at Pangea Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as part of The National Institute for Directing & Ensemble Creation series on theater in communities of color. Many topics were discussed, indigenous playwrights, producers, actors, dancers, dramaturgs all came together (though there were some notable absences due to schedule changes, for the most part the room was a who's who in native lit, theater, film and dance) to discuss the one thing that united us all: the love of nd the aesthetics of Native American and Indigenous performance. At the end of the three-day summit, I agreed to write a piece on the aesthetics of native and indigenous theater, and how we must be able to define for ourselves how our tribal, communal, and world-views inform the political, cultural, and spiritual context of Native American and Indigenous performance. Drawing upon my work as a scholar , playwright, and poet, I took this first attempt at actualizing what a Native American/Indigenous theater aesthetic looks like, centered in the Mvskoke Creek spirit world that inhabits my friend Joy Harjo's play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. So here goes…: The term American Indian identity is problematic, at best. A socially constructed ethnic identity in the United States and abroad, the term ―American Indian (and later ―Native American) signified a unified racial category to describe thousands of peoples of varying languages, cultures, religions, and world views. In addition to the so-called " ethnic " categorization, American Indian identity also carries with it the weight of a political term, that is a citizen of a sovereign nation that resides within the borders of the United States. The political identity of citizenship within one's nation also is problematic, but that is another discussion for another time. The United Nations defines an indigenous person as " the descendants-according to a common definition-of those who inhabited a country or a geographical region at the time when people of different cultures or ethnic origins arrived. " (http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/ documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf) The new arrivals later became dominant through conquest, occupation, settlement or other means. Of all racial categories in the United States, only one racial category is defined legally and enforced by the federal government; that is the racial category ―American Indian. The essentializing strategies employed by the federal government to divide and conquer the tribal power of the indigenous peoples inhabiting the United States created further legislation which allowed the federal government to forcibly remove tribal peoples from their ancestral homelands into urban areas with promises of jobs and security. Urban relocation in the 1950's and 1960's was the culmination of a series of government policies designed to assimilate Indians into mainstream culture, isolating Indian families and communities. However, tribal peoples continued to make connections with one another in urban areas and created a network of community that would later give birth to the pan-Indian movement. For the native diaspora, the pan-Indian movement allowed for a creation of communal space in urban areas in which an urbanI " Indian identity "