Three Plays: The Indolent Boys, Children of the Sun, The Moon in Two Windows (review)

N. Scott Momaday's book Three Plays honors American Indian cultural memory, events, and people, some of whose stories have been known and some of whose, as Momaday writes, "have now become visible in the long lens of history" (6). The first play in the collection, The Indolent Boys, focuses on an event Momaday describes as "deeply and ever more dimly embedded in Kiowa oral tradition" (5), the death in 1891 of three Kiowa boys who ran away from the Kiowa Boarding School and froze to death in a fierce snowstorm. The boys had fled because the oldest, fifteen-year-old Seta, had been whipped by Barton Wherritt, the teacher and disciplinarian of the school. When the Kiowa people learned of the deaths of their beloved children, who were returning to their people's camps ("They are homesick, / they are going to the camps, / they are camping," the old Kiowa storyteller Mother Goodeye tells us in the play's prologue [10]), the Kiowa descended upon the school in outrage and sorrow and attacked G. P. Gregory, the school superintendent. They were actually seeking Wherritt, who cowardly hid in the school rafters to escape their wrath.

Each of these historical figures, as well as the fictional white teacher, Carrie, and the Kiowa student John Pai—whom the school officials hold up as the paragon of their successful efforts to "civilize" Indians—become characters in The Indolent Boys. Each tells a version of her or his relationship to the "civilizing" process of boarding-school education for Kiowa children, using the deaths of the three boys as the occasion through which the white characters attempt to justify their faux-philanthropic and patently racist visions for Indian assimilation or to clarify why, through the voices of Mother Goodeye and John Pai, this education will never transform Indian people into whites.

John Pai is imagined by the school authorities to be the counterpoint to the runaway Seta, whom Wherritt blames for the death of the three boys to deflect blame for having inflicted the whipping that led to Seta's flight. Seta is guilty because, as Wherritt tells Carrie, "Let's be honest, he is an Indian, a savage" (47). Carrie is more sympathetic and human than the white male characters in this play, yet she nevertheless subscribes to the fundamental belief that boarding-school education will be the salvation of Native peoples. She makes this clear when she tells John Pai that, "You're our entry, John, and our offering, our dearest sacrifice. You are what we've got to show for all the disappointment and frustration of this place" (29). Yet in an earlier soliloquy to a painting of President Lincoln, Pai articulates his understanding that "School here, Mr. Lincoln, is a camp where the memory is killed. . . . Here at the Kiowa Boarding School at Anadarko, Oklahoma, on the banks of the Washita River, I am taught not to remember but to dismember myself" (24). Pai ultimately subverts his teachers' dreams to become their "civilized" showpiece by returning to his people's camps in place of "the frozen boys" (69), allowing Momaday to fulfill his wish to commemorate through this play the three boys and the spirit of the Kiowa people who fought for them.

Children of the Sun is a one-act play for children in twelve scenes that dramatize "an ancient Kiowa narrative . . . about the twin heroes" (77). Readers of The Way to Rainy Mountain will recognize reconfigurations of several Kiowa stories in that text, from The Sun's visit to his future wife in the form of the redbird (83) to a version of the arrow maker's story in which the arrow maker is one of the hero twins speaking to Grandmother Spider and to the stranger outside the tepee: "If you are a Kiowa, you will understand what I am...