A Legacy of Furious Men: The American Indian Movement and Anna Mae Aquash in Plays by Tomson Highway, E. Donald Two-Rivers, Yvette Nolan, and Bruce King

Four Indigenous plays first staged from 1989 to 1998 evaluate the legacy of the American Indian Movement, with particular attention to aim’s history of violence against women. Using the artifice of drama to render divisive experiences coherent, the plays expose conflicts and contradictions within aim in order to posit a top-down misogyny at odds with the organization’s mission as an agent of change. All the plays draw on the period framed by the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 and the murder of Mi’kmaq activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash in 1975. All of them bear witness to the feminist backlash against aim and to the communal rehabilitation of Native women of the Red Power era. And all of them call out aim’s furious men, with anger, with laughter, with or without indulgence, and with the ironic imposition of distance from the events they re-create or the visceral sting of immersion in them. They honor women elided in most accounts of aim, whose histories they suffuse with wisdom and compassion. Maybe they offer transcendence, too. Yvette Nolan recently remarked that “much of the work being done in Native theatre . . . [is] about becoming whole again through the very act of remembering, and then being able to move forward” (“Hopeful” 31). These plays remember.

Collectively, the plays illustrate drama’s ability to examine reform movements and to clarify and evaluate the fissures intrinsic to them. The skill and vigor with which they do so suggest that all of them deserve serious attention of the sort already accorded to the earliest entry: Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989), by Tomson Highway (Cree). Highway presents Wounded Knee as the epicenter of the toxic misogyny that his play fears. His attempt to counter this malevolence is formulaic by design, a pleading and artificial search for relief in a plot that he recognizes as uncooperative. E. Donald Two-Rivers (Ojibwa) follows suit in Chili Corn (1997; 2001) when he employs the formal apparatus of comedy to mock what he regards as the incompatibility of aim’s ideals and the attitudes toward women displayed by some of its members.¹ Two-Rivers applauds local engagement but dismisses preening radicalism as incompatible with the comic business of falling in love. Although closure rewards one couple, the play’s dark prologue and ambiguous final scene suggest that comedy’s terminal beneficence is inaccessible to Native women like the young Ojibwa Chili, a victim of domestic violence.

Recuperative comic fantasy finds no quarter in the hagiographic Annie Mae’s Movement (1998; 2006), in which Nolan (Algonquin) confronts Aquash’s murder, the horror that Highway and Two-Rivers had swerved to avoid. Endorsing charges advanced in 1977 and bolstered in the 1990s, Nolan declares aim and the fbi partners in Aquash’s death. Its circular representation of life and death ensures that the play will reference but not endorse the telic assumptions of bourgeois tragedy; Nolan writes a lament but not a requiem. Nolan’s criticism of aim places Annie Mae’s Movement in dialogue with Bruce King’s uneasily comic Evening at the Warbonnet (1994; 2006). King’s play is also critical of aim, but the playwright (Haudenosaunee-Oneida) writes men Native or otherwise out of Aquash’s death by pinning the murder on Mable, a dramatization of Aquash’s friend, fellow activist, and (King reminds us) rival in love Kamook Banks, wife of aim cofounder Dennis Banks. King absolves Mable, and we hear nothing more of Aquash. But Mable lingers as a reminder of her husband’s infidelity, devastating in its destruction of the belief in aim’s male leadership to which she had once adhered. A young pimp-junky-wannabe who styles himself “Brave Eagle” has inherited all the ugliness of aim and none of its nobility of purpose. Its activist phase over, King suggests, aim endures as a cover for the abuse of women.

My analysis relies whenever possible on Indigenous commentators. I have benefited particularly from the...