Native American Performance and Representation

9. “People with Strong Hearts”: Staging Communitism in Hanay Geiogamah’s Plays Body Indian and 49

chapter 9 “People with Strong Hearts” Staging Communitism in Hanay Geiogamah’s Plays Body Indian and 49 Jaye T. Darby We pray. We are a tribe! Of people with strong hearts. Who respect fear As we make our way. Who will never kill Another man’s way of living. —Hanay Geiogamah, 49, scene 12 As is often said, community is the highest value for Native peoples, and fidelity to it is a primary responsibility. —Jace Weaver, Other Words1 Our abilities as writers—as novelists and poets, playwrights and essayists—are a gift given to us by the Creator. It is our obligation to return that gift, to make use of it in a way that serves the people and the generations to come. —Joseph Bruchac, “The Gift Is Still Being Given”2 the 1960s and 1970s in the United States saw the rise of American Indian activism, sometimes called the Red Power movement, as Native activists pushed for increased Native rights, tribal sovereignty, and selfdetermination .3 These efforts resulted in a number of acts of resistance. The National Indian Youth Council, a Native-rights organization founded in 1961, supported the Northwestern tribes’ “fish-ins” in Washington and 156 Jaye T. Darby Oregon held during the sixties to reclaim tribal fishing rights established in earlier treaties. The American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in Minneapolis in 1968 to address police harassment, rapidly became a militant force for Indian rights throughout the country. On Thanksgiving Day, November 20, 1969, United Indians of All Tribes reclaimed Alcatraz Island to expose the injustices perpetrated against American Indians and to establish cultural and educational centers. In 1973, members of AIM occupied Wounded Knee on Pine Ridge in South Dakota, site of the U.S. Army’s 1890 massacre of nearly 300 Minneconjou Lakota men, women, and children.4 During this period of political upheaval, Hanay Geiogamah, a young Kiowa-Delaware activist in Oklahoma, became interested in the possibility of theater as an agent of Indian cultural renewal. In recalling this time, he wrote, “By 1968 my political crusading and my interest in theater began to merge, initially in a conception of writing plays which would depict the truth about the condition of American Indians.”5 Four years later, as a member of the National Indian Youth Council, and encouraged by the possibilities offered by the free theater movement in the sixties, on March 1, 1972, in New York City, Geiogamah founded the American Indian Theater Ensemble (later renamed the Native American Theater Ensemble) at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club with the help of Ellen Stewart.6 With the dual goals of establishing a resident company in Indian Country and helping develop Native performing arts within interested tribal communities , Geiogamah began the theater as a collaborative endeavor by recruiting a group of Native American artists from a range of communities, who formed the creative core of the new theater company.7 Recognizing the potential of performance as a means to revitalize cultural continuity after centuries of European American disruptions, Geiogamah described contemporary American Indian theater as “a logical development because in the tribal past, before the breakdown of the classic modes, communication had been person-to-person, group-to-group, through storytelling and dance and the symbolic communication provided by ceremony in a familial situation .”8 For Geiogamah, “The stage therefore seemed to offer Indians— provided only that they could control it—a means of self-realization and of presenting culturally authentic images of themselves.”9 Hanay Geiogamah’s early work with the Native American Theater Ensemble offered a comprehensive vision for theater that imagined com- staging communitism in hanay geiogamah's plays 157 munity in this broad sense, a vision that continues to resonate today. During the next three years, Geiogamah wrote three major plays—Body Indian, Foghorn, and 49—which were workshopped and performed by the Native American Theater Ensemble. These works displayed a distinctive American Indian aesthetic of theater that fused Native traditions and current issues, ushering in “the contemporary era of Native American playwriting ,” according to Mimi Gisolfi D’Aponte.10 Intentional in his positionality, Geiogamah locates his drama within his own Kiowa-Delaware traditions and larger pan-Indian experiences while recognizing—as a secondary influence —western theatrical traditions. Centering his work in the nurturing reciprocity of stories and the “rich and complex inheritance” of tribal cultures in American Indian communities, he defines stories broadly as “dances, rituals, ceremonies, customs, and...