Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women's Theater, and: Native American Drama: A Critical Perspective (review)

For the emerging field of Native American performance studies in need of both published primary texts and critical studies, two recent books, Performing Worlds into Being and Native American Drama, contribute valuable resources. Performing Worlds, an outgrowth of the Native American Women Playwrights Archive (NAWPA) 2007 conference, "Honoring Spiderwoman Theater/Celebrating Native American Theater," collects performance texts, essays, and panel discussions from conference participants together with a CD-ROM of images and video clips. Native American Drama, the first monograph by theater critic and dramaturge Christy Stanlake, articulates a three-pronged critical framework with which to read and understand such performance texts through a Native-specific lens. Reading the two alongside one another underscores not only how Native drama deserves attention separate from both mainstream American drama and Native American literature more generally but also how it uniquely responds to the concerns of twenty-first-century Native communities.

NAWPA's third conference at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, brought together practitioners, scholars, and theorists from North America, Central America, and the Pacific Islands to discuss the work and legacy of Spiderwoman Theater, the longest-running Native women's performance group in North America, and the field of Native women's theater more generally. Editors Ann Elizabeth Armstrong, Kelli Lyon Johnson, and William A. Wortman organized many of the conference proceedings, including six previously unpublished plays, into the four sections of Performing Worlds. Together, these works epitomize the diversity of Native women's drama even as their collection underscores the need for a field of criticism devoted to their related foundations, methods, and concerns.

Two related themes repeat throughout many of the pieces. The first—that contemporary Native theater serves as a vehicle for reexamining tribal and intertribal histories—gives rise to the second—that Native drama can serve as a tool for healing and transforming contemporary Native communities. In her essay "Blind Faith Remembers," Jill Carter (Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi) reads such potential in Kuna/Rappahannock playwright-performer Monique Mojica's one-woman show Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots. Mojica's "transformational dramaturgy" includes layers of historical references akin to a mola, a complex hand-woven cloth created by Kuna women. Through this layering process, which links the Algonquian Sky Woman creation story with diplomatic histories of Pocahontas and other Indigenous women, contemporary misinterpretations of Native women's cultural and political roles, and Coyote trickster stories, among other material, Mojica enacts a "performative intervention" into the "one-dimensional characters . . . of European history books" (26). Other pieces in Performing Worlds—including "Weaving the Rain" by Dianne Yeahquo Reyner (Kiowa) and "Pushing the Bear" by Diane Glancy (Cherokee)—similarly revisit and revise Euroamerican histories of Native peoples, and they do so through the adaptation of generations-old tribal traditions of storytelling and creativity for the stage. Out of this engagement both with cultural and colonial histories comes the potential for, as Spiderwoman Theater founding member Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) states, "healing: of ourselves, our extended families, and our communities" (42). Through collaborations that involve writers, performers, spectators, and community members, Native theater—and the works included in Performing Worlds in particular—can abandon "victim narratives," as Mojica calls them, in favor of stories of transformation (2).

Unfortunately, these themes of history, tradition, healing, and collaboration are touched on only briefly by the volume's introduction, leaving key terms like performance and transformation undertheorized, except by some of the contributions themselves. While such an editing strategy emphasizes the participatory role and responsibility of the reader to trace shared meanings, methods, and goals across the seventeen contributions, it is also a missed opportunity for a young and growing field to detail a cohesive critical frame with which to approach its primary texts...