Renowned Native American Indian playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr. has a new production about to go on tour, but Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers will almost certainly be seen by more non-Native than Native Americans. So why is it so important for indigenous culture?
Grandchildren tells the story of a mixed-race family, descended from a Native-American grandmother and African-American grandfather, that has been kept on the fringes of Native society because they are ” ‘too Black’ to be Native”. The opening scene is a silhouette of a cowboy and a Native Indian woman, which then moves to the same view a hundred years later, with a contemporary couple replacing the originals.
The play draws on Yellow Robe’s own experiences growing up and illumines the complex issues surrounding Native-on-Native racism, as well as the rapid social and technological changes that have affected indigenous societies.
Whilst the play contains scenes that are probably familiar to most Native Americans, Yellow Robe substantiates the point made by Cherokee playwright Diane Glancy, that neither his play, nor the medium, represents an archetypal spokes-vehicle for all Native groups.
At the same time, he feels that indigenous theatre, created and performed by Native Americans, can be a powerful tool that encourages indigenous people to value themselves in more positive terms than those stereotypes foisted upon them by mainstream culture.
Mainstream interest in Native culture is often seen as being preoccupied with the more traditional indigenous artforms. Elizabeth Hutchison, Assistant Professor of American Art History at Barnard/Columbia, writes that early historians “privileged artistic traditions that seemed untainted by Western influences. Hybrid art forms were dismissed as inauthentic, assimilationist, or even degenerate. In recent decades, however, art historians have become interested in how indigenous material and visual culture can express the transcultural situation of American Indian people.”
By employing theatre to speak out about the ‘transcultural situation’ he has grown up in and continues to experience, Yellow Robe is doing more than just engaging in a hybrid art form. “Playwriting, and all the other art forms, are political when people of color do it,” he says, “because we empower ourselves, we take control of our past, present and future.”
Generations of Native Americans have lived with the effects of government policies designed to alienate them in their own country. It has therefore been a challenge for some Native Americans to accept that indigenous art and artists have an important place within both the Native and mainstream cultures.
Organisations such as the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts Development have been making significant inroads by following its mission statement to be “a multi-tribal center of higher education dedicated to the preservation, study, creative application, and contemporary expression of American Indian and Alaska Native arts and cultures.”
At the other end of the funding scale, The Morning Star Community Theatre, which works primarily with at-risk youth on the Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation, was established to ‘inspire, teach and provide a springboard of opportunity’ for young people in a community where before it was set up, the performing arts were almost non-existent.
Meanwhile former Trinity Rep artistic director Oscar Eustis, says that he hopes the touring production of Yellow Robe’s Grandchildren will set a pattern for other Native American plays. “We are hoping to build an audience and employment opportunities, not only for Bill but other Native American theatre folk,” he says.
For non-Indians indigenous theatre represents an opportunity to be entertained as well as participate in what could be the seeds for meaningful cultural exchange. Commenting on how many non-Natives in the audience for his previous production, Better-n-Indins, were uncomfortable, Yellow Robe makes the point that, “for them, it was seeing a part of America that was just up the street but that they were not even aware of.” He says that he hopes audiences attending Grandchildren will listen to for a message, “And that, listening, maybe they’ll realize they don’t know all the answers. Because we don’t know them, either.”
