Interview with Debbie Hicks, company member

By Robert Leonard

Debbie Hicks: I was very pleased when LeAnne first e-mailed me about your project. She spoke very enthusiastically about your discussions. LeAnne is a very decisive personality, so I knew that when she made up her mind that she wanted to participate that she has good reason to follow through.

Robert Leonard: When did you start with WagonBurner?

DH: Let’s see...the Quincentennial was 1992...1991. Late 1991.

RL: Where were you?

DH: At that time I was in Iowa City, Iowa. All of the WagonBurner Theatre Troop members were in the Iowa City area. LeAnne was working with International Student Services. Her husband Jim was working on a doctorate. That is the reason that LeAnne was in the area. I was thinking I would work on an inter-disciplinary doctorate, so I was in the area. I believe everyone was either a student, faculty member, staff member, former student or family member of someone connected with the university at the time.

RL: Do you remember how you heard of the company?

DH: Absolutely! I was at a dinner at the Latino/Native American Cultural Center at the University of Iowa. There were nights that the Native American student organization and other student organizations sponsored dinners for the Native student and community members in the area. The Mesquakie reservation is a little over an hour away. Some of the Mesquakie had come in, some of the Mesquakie elders. I met LeAnne. I had been a storyteller. We had a mutual interest in writing. Someone introduced us, said, "Oh here is another southerner, another Okie." Most people assume I am from Oklahoma, being Creek Most Creeks are there. We met and spoke. I think that was the first conversation.

RL: You are a storyteller from sometime back then?

DH: Yes. I have been a storyteller off and on. I enjoy that. I really think of myself primarily as a storyteller.

RL: In terms of your own telling, do you tell contemporary stories?

DH: A medley. Traditional stories, riffs on traditional stories in a contemporary setting. Folk stories from Native communities remaining in the south after removal. Especially stories that took place during segregation. And I tell stories that are not Native, just southern folk stories. I think that is very southern, don’t you? Seems to be a passion that transcends descriptions, ethnicity, class or religion in the south. I used to tell stories at Girl Scout and Boy Scout camps.

RL: My theater in Johnson City started, I think, in some part because the National Association of Storytelling was based in Jonesboro, Tennessee. Right next door. I met some of the folks that were associated with that early on in the ’70’s. We put a show together and played it in Jonesboro. The people were so responsive. So quick to understand what was going on. It was a great experience. It gave us a lot of courage to keep on going.

DH: I can appreciate that. I started storytelling more formally when I was in college, undergraduate school. I started telling stories in schools, Girl Scout camps, sometimes folk festivals, colleges, wherever I had an audience. It was quite informal then. I know where there are storytelling competitions now in schools. There is so much more structure in presentations. I think for me storytelling was simply whatever opportunity I seized upon it. I didn’t think of it so much as an art as simply an opportunity to interact with people. It was a another opportunity for me to learn about people, through their reactions to my stories. Storytelling breaks down boundaries. You have an exchange of stories between people who might not normally interact as comfortably. This is the post-years after desegregation. I always worked in areas where there were segregated facilities and I was community organizing.

RL: I am interested to know how you compare the form WagonBurner uses as theater with storytelling. Is it storytelling? Is that part of it?

DH: Oh yes. Storytelling was inherently part of it. We used "Indian Radio Days" as an evolving format. Each script varied. We changed not only characters, but also vignettes, depending on our audience. Who was our audience? What message were we trying to communicate at that time? If there was some event that was current in Indian Country or off the news that we wanted to include in our commentary, we adapted that. We tried out characters on audiences and sometimes kept them and sometimes dropped them. So, we use that sort of ’40s radio-theater vignette as a format, allowing our characters to interact not just with each other but with the audience.

Now, one of my characters that we retained throughout the plays acted as the narrator. That was the Bingo Lady. This bingo lady is acting as a caller in an Indian bingo hall. The bingo hall serves as a structure to move from one vignette to another, to move through time and space. Bringing the audience back to the bingo hall is a constant theme. The thing I enjoyed about it was that the audience entered and were given bingo cards, dried corn or some other markers and explained that they were coming in to play bingo. Often I was sitting in the audience as the play began. I would leave my seat in the audience, go on to the stage and explain that I was the host for the evening. I would tell them that we were there to play bingo, how to play bingo, and practice the calls, tease someone in the audience and use that as a segue for the opening vignette. So, we would move from time and space and return back to the bingo hall. It was always 29 minutes past the hour. The time never varied. We had a narrator who was acting as a radio announcer and narrator. The narrator always returned to the same time. When the radio announcer was speaking she would periodically remind the audience that it was 29 minutes past the hour.

I think part of what we were trying to do was to orient the audience to the concept of "Indian time." That there are differences in concepts in time for Native cultures, indigenous cultures, and the dominant culture of the United States. An event has its own process or sequence to work out. I think that was in part because there is this cultural motif, this running joke, about Indians not making it on time, not making it to an appointment. That an event is running on Indian time whether it is a pow-wow or a family reunion. We stop and say, "Well, we are running on Indian time today." And also there are some problems – I think you can have a social commentary – that have remained constant even though the expression has changed over time for Native cultures: dealing with the dominant culture. So, that was one of our constants. Sometimes the narrator would be in the audience, too. When LeAnne played the narrator sometimes she would be in the audience and I would be there in another place. LeAnne was always very well dressed, attractive presentation. Bingo Lady was an older woman. A bit dowdy, something of a shrill character. I can’t think of any television character that would come closer except for a somewhat calmer "Flo," if you remember the waitress "Flo." The old lady had a large family, she was related to the tribal chairman, she sort of segued back and forth between relationships with her unspecified Native community and her pragmatic, if somewhat critical, relationship with her nephew, the tribal chairman, who was involved in all kinds of shenanigans, ripping people off. Bingo Lady is always making commentaries about her relatives or trying to find someone a job, observations about maybe a niece who has one of the government scholarships and how well she is or isn’t doing adjusting to life in an eastern school.

RL: She seems to me to be the one who is able to get things done, to put things together, to work with what is given and get something out of it.

DH: She is a pragmatic elder. Not necessarily someone who would be recognized as a powerful figure, if you walk into a bingo hall and see some lady sitting there with the chips. But in Native cultures you certainly often have a figure – and in southern cultures, being matrilineal, it is often a woman – being the one going into the community and relating back and forth. Could be seen as maybe a gossip, but also knows how to hold her tongue when it is appropriate. I enjoyed that character. I created that character. When I saw the script, there was a line for a walk-on part. The Bingo Lady came out and called out numbers and left. LeAnne asked me to do something with it and develop the character. So, I just went out and played it for several women that I had known. That is a happy character too. The Bingo Lady had her problems in life, but she always remained optimistic and philosophical that life would out live her problems and that she would enjoy living life with the problems.

RL: I think I understand that she started off as a small character?

DH: Mm-hm. A walk-on.

RL: How did that work? That process of development?

DH: When I joined the cast, the core cast members had already started rehearsing. I guess they needed a replacement. So, the character was not fully defined. LeAnne was gracious enough to allow me to present my understanding of Bingo Lady, who she might be, at a rehearsal. She offered her suggestions and the suggestions of the other cast and then rolled with it. At that time, Bingo Lady was playing off the narrator. At that time, that was Dr. Science. So, he and I were interacting and we played off one another’s goofy sense of humor. The part evolved that way.

RL: This was basically improvised?

DH: Yes. I had some lines that I would return to during the performances. But LeAnne largely would say however many minutes, like three-minute, 40-second monologue or 23 seconds interacting with a Mohawk. She allowed me a lot of freedom in doing that. Sometimes we were having difficulty changing sets or those problems that come up. She would block out vignettes so that we wouldn’t have down time. I would see her back there motioning. I would look and see that my time or my order had changed with the Bingo Lady and I needed to go improvise. The church-lady fashions developed in part to allow for time in changing sets. One of the performances where we were having a bit of difficulty with the physical layout, the Bingo Lady could interact with the audience playing bingo and give out what we called church-lady fashions. She had big ol’ brown paper grocery bags filled with old clothes from a thrift store or Salvation Army store. The kind of thing where you always see people collecting old clothes to give to Indians on the reservation. So, we were giving them back. The audience is actually playing bingo and we would have winners, so the church-lady fashions – polyester print suits –

RL: That’s great.

DH: Some of the things that I really enjoyed about WagonBurner – partially because we had this constantly evolving story of the universe to tell – is that we had to improvise and be creative. Sometimes we were improvising on the spot in front of an audience. The pieces that worked best we kept. The pieces that fell flat, we shuddered and moved on and left those out of our repertoire.

RL: Were the other characters developed similarly?

DH: Well, developed in terms of people bringing suggestions and sitting around in a living room and discussing characters, and arguing about what was realistic for a character and believable. People presenting their own work. LeAnne always improvised that she saw the theater as a collective. As a communal artistic expression. We developed it that way, but certainly LeAnne carried the final say-so. If there was any question about what we would and would not do, LeAnne was our director and producer and we would defer to her decision. We had some spirited discussions. People fell in love with their characters and sometimes a character wasn’t right for our particular script, or the character needed to evolve to be fully responsive to an audience.

Humor is a defining characteristic of a culture. Humor defines in group membership, humor expresses and articulates relationships within a culture, allows members of a culture to distinguish themselves from others who are not a part of the culture. It is a negotiation process for cultural identity and cultural expression. There were times when what worked very well for when we were performing for a primarily Native audience fell flat, or we had laughs, but people were laughing for two different reasons. We had a Native audience laughing, and then we would turn around and portions we meant seriously, sometimes non-Native audiences would react to as very campy. You would see Natives from very different backgrounds who didn’t share a common sense of identity would recognize a commonality of experience and laugh heartily. That always fascinated me. Who was laughing when? And who was laughing how? We spoke in a farcical way sometimes and then people would ask us these serious questions when we were just being corny and speaking in an exaggerated manner.

You spoke of storytelling. Steve Thunder McGuire, who is our professor at the University of Iowa, brings a very strong southeastern Native sense of humor to his telling. He is a professional storyteller. He is a very talented artist. He can present a number of genres: visual art …

RL: Is he part of the WagonBurner?

DH: Yes. Steve Thunder, charming wonderful person. Not a pretentious bone in his body. He likes to tell stories barefoot. He’s this tall, lanky fellow. The Native cast members are primarily of southeastern peoples and eastern peoples. Thunder is from his grandfather’s name, but he likes to take his shoes off, this long, lanky fellow with long-toed bony feet, and tell stories barefoot, just curled up on the rug or the sofa and looking so much like a fraternity boy. Steve designed the sets. He and his art students actually made the sets. He was working on his tenure. He is a really good fellow, good artist. One of the most decent people I’ve ever met. You know how some people just seem to be born decent and kind? He is one of those persons.

RL: WagonBurner was put together for "Indian Radio Days." is that correct?

DH: Yeah.

RL: How long did that go?

DH: We performed different versions of the script up through ’97 or ’98. As I said, each script was different, which I think fit into LeAnne’s original idea about the play from the beginning. She wanted to have what she called an evolving theater experience. She wanted it to be an educational experience where the cast could offer perspectives, both social commentary and historical information about Native cultures. Especially those southeastern in origin. Those voices you don’t hear as often in Indian Country. People think of Native theater, certainly here in Washington and in most major cities, people think of choreography or dance and storytelling. Even the dance forms that are within it have, for the most part, nothing to do with southeastern cultures. We are heavy-footed dancers. Stomp dancing. The feet hardly come off the ground. It is not a dance form in which individuality is prized or encouraged. It is a dance in which the choreography of movement between participants is highly valued. Everyone is seeking to be in step. You are seeking to share. Your left foot comes down and, however many other people are dancing, hopefully they are stomping with their left foot at the same time. That isn’t something you find with those western cultures. They are a little too high-stepping.

Now I think the core cast members came to a point in life where a lot of people decided they wanted to seek a graduate degree or seeking tenure or whatever. For a period of time, now, particularly LeAnne has been advancing in some of her other goals outside of the theater troop. We keep in touch, but sort of the common understanding is that we have things that we need to do with our lives personally before we devote as much time to the theater. Justin has advanced in his career as a photographer. One of the reasons that I came here is that I have a neurological disorder and I can receive treatment for it with an FDA experimental compound. This is an area in which I can receive that treatment. Claire is fulfilling a dream of hers to work in Kosovo at this time. She must be the only Cherokee working in Kosovo. She is also using her understanding of Native women’s movements and organizations to serve as a model in relief work with Kosovo women. I believe she must be unique in relief work. I know that she certainly has some good stories to tell about not taking a bath for a few weeks, and the carnage of the aftermath of civil strife that is still going on in working with women.

RL: During the span from 1992 to 1997, you performed at various rates of speed. Sometimes just one night, sometimes a long run. Were you all based out of Iowa City?

DH: We were all in the Iowa City area. I went to Minneapolis for about half a year to study with a theorist there at the University of Minnesota. I would still make my connections back. We were all full-time students and had full-time jobs and family responsibilities. Really, the theater had to adapt. That was really the way we could do that. I don’t think there was much funding available, so we had to find someone that had the great discernment to pay for us to come so that we could have the resources to formally present our work, and then pull back to those kitchen and living-room meetings. Sitting, eating, drinking a lot of Coca-Cola. Working on that. I know that we were really fortunate in a way. At times, I felt very frustrated, thinking that I would like to do this full-time. I don’t know of a Native theater troop that can survive doing the type of work we did without having independent incomes. The first check I made working with WagonBurner was the Quincentennial performance. It tickled me. After she divided everything up, she gave us each a fifteen-dollar check. A fifteen-dollar check, and we did what? Maybe six performances that week.

RL: To say nothing of the rehearsal process and getting to those performances.

DH: To say nothing of the rehearsal process and delving into our own pockets to get costumes and set materials. We just took that for granted. I wore for a number of the sketches my dance skirt, the skirt that I wear when I go home for stomp dancing. I actually ended up giving that skirt to my godson’s new wife when she started coming to stomp dances. She is still wearing it, I believe. One of the things that is posted with the Native Women Playwright’s Archive, I am wearing this bulking deer hide. What I am actually wearing is four layers of costumes. I would go in and maybe have 20 seconds to change. I would go in and throw a costume on over the costume I had on at the time. So, I am wearing LeAnne’s wedding dress on top of a dance dress and another kind of bulky cotton skirt. I will say this. That deer hide fit LeAnne much better than it ever fit me. It was the wedding dress that she wore when she married Jim.

RL: Are there other scripts that have come along with WagonBurner?

DH: We have a script that LeAnne is not fully satisfied with. It is a spoof on "The Wizard of Oz". Part of the reason that LeAnne wanted to do that was, here is this beloved story, a children’s story, it is enchanting, every American has some familiarity with it. The author of that story was a newspaper owner and editor that published several diatribes calling for the extinction of Natives. He didn’t like Indians. He felt there was this sort of natural demise of the savage before civilization. With conflicts that were ongoing in the Dakotas and so forth, he called for the U.S. to use its military power to remove, in any way possible – whether physically to remove or exterminate – any Indians who were blocking the progress. That is a complicated piece of history that most Americans – myself as a child loving the movie and reading the books – did not recognize. So, this is one of the reasons LeAnne wanted to write a satire. Something that would spoof off of this history.

We have all of these cultural icons and the colonization and often extermination of Native individuals, as well as Native cultures, is not something we discuss. Right now, I am teaching. I am working with at-risk youth in the District. I am dealing with these African-American youth and we were having this discussion about a book. It was one of their assigned readers, a fictionalized account of Orville and Wilber Wright as youth. It is laced, from the first page, with racist images of Indians that no one questions. The very first page, "yelling like wild Indians." I am trying to talk with my students about stereotypes and the complex relationship between African-Americans and Native Americans. The dominant culture in general with Native Americans. They were not getting it. For the most part, except for one girl who said, "Well, Indians are people and all people have feelings and that is not nice. But I didn’t think about it." Of course my boys got up and did a little war dance.

I mean, look at Washington. I am surrounded by it every morning on the subway. I see Redskins, Redskins, Redskins. I go to a faculty meeting or workshop in the district and teachers are wearing Redskins jerseys or Redskins jackets. That is just fine. And I am dealing with mostly African-American students, faculty and parents. There is this question of: well, of course I can say Redskins. We wouldn’t have a team called the Detroit Coons, but that is still free for all in America. You have Native people who are human beings and cultures that are not widely known or appreciated, lives that are largely obscured. But then you have this concept that has been created and evolved and reinforced by the movies so heavily of Indians as a creation. A racial creation. It is a comforting image. You have these humorous characters that are buffoons. You have the savages who really don’t deserve this country because they couldn’t make use of it in the right way and were really uncivilized and stood blocking progress. And then you have the good, dead Indians that are so far gone in memory that it is nice to have rivers and hills and valleys that are named after them. Particularly if they are not from your part of the country. You go through Iowa and there are all these places that sympathetically were named after southeastern people who were removed with Trail of Tears. But you don’t see the names for the peoples that are there presented with the same sympathy. They are tucked away in some other corner of memory. The back closets of American conscience.

RL: I have my own family story for that. My mother understood that the southwest tribes were going to dance and it was going to be one of the last times they were going to do this particular dance for some particular reason. My mother went out there to see this. She was very sympathetic for these people. She was living in Vermont. She had no idea that there were Native people living in Vermont. No idea. No idea that there were reservations of people across the river. And that kind of "the problem is over there" is so convenient, to step aside from the problem that is at hand.

DH: Well, Native peoples, not just in the Americas, but worldwide, are the canaries. Like the canaries in the mines. I think truly you are looking at this juxtaposition of images. The dominant culture in the United States has to protect those images of the Indian that it finds endearing and useful. ’Cause otherwise you have to talk seriously with your neighbors, whether they are distant neighbors or they are down the street carrying a business card that says "Proud to be a Monacan," and then you have conflicts of conscience and interest. Humor around Indians and racial images of Indians created by the dominant culture have obscured the real political needs and realities and complexities with Native nations and the individuals who are a part of those nations and communities. I think that is a part of what we wanted to do with the troupe. We wanted to use humor to raise questions. We didn’t feel like we had the time to offer so many answers, but we hoped we could invoke some honest conversation between the cast and the audience. It was our practice to have cast members available for discussion either informally out in the audience or wherever possible, to invite audience members who wanted to remain after production and talk with the cast. Questions and answers about the play, about our lives, about our opinions. I mean, someone tried to stress that we are offering our opinions as individuals. I think that was one of the most constructive parts of our theater. We saw ourselves as an educational troupe. A classroom brought to the stage. We made ourselves available that way.

RL: How did that work? Think of a couple of times you remember either doing that or observing that, the discussion that came right out of performance.

DH: I can tell you two that stand out in my mind. One with non-Native audience members in Lake Forest University outside of Chicago, and the other at the biannual conference on Indian Humor which was held that year at Iowa State University, where we had a primarily Native audience.

With the Indian Humor Conference, we were a bit taken back by the real, very strong, very forcefully expressed, somewhat challenging or negative responses from some Indian men in the audience who were unhappy with one of our characters, especially – an implied gay character who is played somewhat effeminate, Justin played that character at times, who had been a social activist. There were these big, husky, strong, tall, Native men from Western cultures who personally found that offensive and challenging to their understanding of Native manhood. However, it was a good timing. Sexuality and gender are recurring themes in Indian Country, regardless of how acculturated the individual or the community, or deculturated the individual or community, or reculturated the individual or community. Traditional cultures have very different understandings of gender and sexuality and family and community relationships. Gender and sexual minorities are sometimes presented now, especially now by gay writers as having been revered, or, I think more accurately, as simply being accepted. There were normal variations in the human experience, some of which statistically occurred less frequently. But these fellows didn’t like that. I thought that was really good.

Here we had a discussion between Natives who were already had very conflicting histories, from Western cultures and Eastern cultures. You have the Southeast – these large agricultural societies living in towns, and even, for the time, would be considered cities. Are you familiar with the Cahokia mounds? One of the archeological sites that is near St. Louis? Well, Cahokia was one of these effigy cities that archeologists really delight in. You can look down from an airplane and see this beautiful array of images, these earthen mounds, earthen pyramids that have been designed to look like snakes, or... But you can’t fully appreciate the design unless you are from the ground where the people were living, and working, and worshipping and trading in their daily lives. However, there you have agricultural societies with complex economies. The image of the Indian, that even predominates through Indian Country, was shaped so much by the latter stages of conquest where you had the resistant people who, after the acquisition of the horse and certain technologies, had left even semihorticultural societies and become mobile, hunting societies. Even for a brief period of time, even for 100 years, it developed these fervently loved lifeways and cultures that were literally destroyed by the military. Closing in of the East to West, to what became the interior of the United States. That mopping up process in the 1880’s after the unpleasantries of the War Between the States established how things would run within the United States. So, those are vastly loved images of Indian-ness that are adopted by inculturated societies east, west and interior, and by individuals who are looking for an expression of Indian-ness, but may be remote or even detached totally from their own cultures of origin.

RL: And this all came up in the discussion about the gay man?

DH: Well, it was a somewhat disjointed commentary, but yes, of course. At first you had this man who is looking at his wife and saying, "Real Indians have the pipe, and real Indians really resist, and then there is all this concept question about race. Look at you, you are the all American Indians." Ever hear that? As soon as I got to the University of Iowa Navaho and Lakota students would ask, "Are you one of those All-American Indians? You know red, white and black. All mixed up with those Eastern peoples. Heh heh heh." Complex histories. You have the questions that come up in Indian Country of who is an Indian? Well, that goes back to what is an Indian? Who gets to decide? Then you have the cultures like the Monacans, who, regardless of deculturation and reculturation in relationship to the dominant cultures, nevertheless started off as different societies. Do you sprinkle or do you dunk? Are you a Baptist or a Presbyterian? Do you dance clockwise or counter-clockwise. My god I have seen Indians about come to blows. "Well, you know, Indians, we always dance clockwise." No, Southeastern cultures dance counter-clockwise.

I have friends that were extremely distraught and would talk for hours on end with me when they were first learning about the agricultural societies of the southeast and the Spanish coming through and seeing Creeks with truncated earthen mounds, burial temples and the priesthood. It was just a very different idea. "You must have gotten those priests from the Christians." No, it was a priesthood of the matrilineal societies that predated contact. The Spanish were sitting there recording what they saw, to their dismay, just as they recorded that gender relations were not working appropriately. Women were heads of clans and households. Men predominated, but were not exclusively public officials. The British turned away delegations of Creeks who presented credentials who included women ambassadors. There was no chief system throughout the Eastern cultures with which I am familiar. The British imposed that understanding when they looked at how they dealt with the Irish, the rebellious Irish. And they saw another group of rebellious people with whom they thought they were not equals, not peers, so they created the concepts of the chief. They carried over what they understood about how they related to the Irish and they imposed the understanding on these new colonial subjects. When you really had governmental systems where a better translation would be the translation of a governor – autonomous provinces organized into confederacies.

So within Indian Country we had our own controversies and our own conflicts in our own discussions, some of which are long overdue and sporadic in taboo subjects such as sexuality and gender. Me, I am the only openly gay person of the group, and I was always jumping up and down saying, "I want to play a gay person! I want to play a gay person!" What I always end up doing is playing the character who is the aunt to the young gay man. There was no initial relationship in the original script between the Bingo Lady and that character, then that character evolved into a nephew who would come in and out. We would have these little riffs going on sometimes and we just needed to have more time interacting with the audience so that we could change our sets or do whatever. So relationships between characters evolved over time that had not existed in the original script. The script itself was written by LeAnne and her good friend Roxy Gordon back in Oklahoma or Texas. I don’t actually recall where they were actually writing it. Then when they came to Iowa we significantly changed it as it evolved. Part of it evolved to meet what individual cast members wanted to do, or what we thought we could do best, and what we wanted to present to our audience at the time. It was not the script that Roxy had originally envisioned.

RL: What about the post-conference discussion with the non-Native audience?

DH: They were laughing. I was a little concerned. LeAnne had expressed some concern, as had some of the cast members. They were not laughing at times. They were very serious at times. We thought, "Gosh, we’ve got something here that isn’t working. It is falling flat." Afterwards, the audience was afraid of offending us. We had this highly educated, affluent audience members who were very sincere about wanting to do the right thing with their Indian experience. We asked the audience, "Why didn’t you laugh when Justin’s character sashayed out onto the stage?" They were concerned that they might offend Indians, or they might offend gay Indians. God help us. They were concerned. There is such an audience anticipation that we are going to hear Indian tragedies. And then we came out and spoke about tragic experiences; alcoholism, conquest, marginalization of sexual-minority peoples within Native cultures, while the cast members were almost giggling at ourselves because we were being so clever and funny presenting these touchy subjects. They just wanted to be PC and do the right thing. They did more laughing 15 minutes into the discussion with us. As if we gave them permission to laugh, when we had not realized that we needed to give them permission. Sometimes the Bingo Lady would come out and prompt the audience. She would make some little comment about some character or situation presented so that we could let them know that it is okay to laugh. You are engaging with us.

RL: So, you started doing that after this?

DH: I think that my character started doing this more frequently after this, because it surprised me. When we were performing in New York at the Museum of the American Indian, I routinely encouraged audience members to laugh and engage. I would tease audience members. Focus on one and tease them if I thought people were looking uncomfortable. Of course, we laugh at situations where we are embarrassed. Here were these people that were sometimes embarrassed, or horrified, or amused. Especially those non-Natives who were so earnest about the Native experience. They are so earnest about it. They have this prick of conscience, that is what drew them to it in the first place, and then it is like, "Okay, we can’t talk honestly if we can’t acknowledge even to ourselves our own embarrassment and confusion and even anger and resentment. We knew that people wouldn’t always agree with us, but they wouldn’t engage with us if they couldn’t express that anger.

RL: That is pretty dangerous, to ask an audience to be honest.

DH: Well, it is pretty scary. They might honestly tell you that they didn’t like your character, or your interpretation, or your performance. Whether you think of yourself as a professional or a semi-professional, I think most people that get up on the stage put their egos on the line. We want to be good. We want to be liked. We want applause and recognition. It becomes a zest. I love it when people engage and laugh when I am speaking. I feel concerned and sad and less in myself if not. Maybe because we are not so professional that our livelihood depended on getting a booking at the Kennedy Center, maybe that gave us a certain freedom to test those boundaries for ourselves as well our audience. However, I would love to have the opportunity to do that at the Kennedy Center. That would be great. We never have had any really strong inquiries from the East Coast. It has primarily come from word-of-mouth. Someone saw the play and passed on to another person from another institution that this would be a good play to produce. It has been primarily referrals.

RL: How long were you in any one community performing?

DH: I would say the longest was a week. Maybe eight days. I think we were in New York maybe closer to two weeks cause we had rehearsal time and then performing time. I think we were only performing for a long weekend, about four days, and we were doing two performances a day. Three performances one Saturday. Perhaps I have a rehearsal blurring into my mind. Oh! I hope I’m not speaking too much about my own characters, but I had a character that I liked. I played a 102-year-old man. I played it at the Indian Humor Conference. People were jolted. I was maybe 30 pounds thinner then, but I was still this short female. I come out on stage and people thought, "Oh look, the way she is walking she is old...oh...she’s a he." It’s not like I was working with such costuming or drag that you would think, "Oh, that is a man walking out there." I enjoyed it.

LeAnne always wanted us to test our own boundaries and cross gender roles, or cross sexuality. She wanted straight actors to play gay parts and gay actors to play maybe even homophobic parts. That wasn’t as popular always with cast members. I think there were a couple of us more eager to do that, more willing. I also presented the old man as coming from a southern people whose ancestors included slaves and Africans. That character was played in front of Native audiences, and it really jolted some of them. Especially outside the South. The southeasters were often really delighted, like, "Oh, we are talking about these things." You tend to have more Indians who are highly educated and sophisticated, I think, who were willing to have this discussion.

It was a very uncomfortable discussion for most southeastern Indians. Those who saw it were often like, "Real Indians never would have been slaves, they would have died first." But there was an extraordinary slave trade with eastern Indians. When the slave ships arrived on the East Coast and Gulf Coast with Africans, they departed for the islands with Indians. That was a clearly political strategy with the British that the Americans picked up and kept the nations at one another’s throats. Let’s get rid of this political obstacle. That is a very unpleasant piece of history that is a taboo topic in Indian Country. Slavery, African descent, African ancestry. That All-American Indian joke goes back to say that is a topic, not a polite one. LeAnne is a person who wants Natives to have conversations about all of our taboos. Not necessarily to resolve or to agree, because she knows there are cultural differences that are possibly irresolvable. Just to have some conversations. Some honest conversations. She wanted to invoke conversations between Natives and non-Native minorities within the United States. LeAnne has a long history of trying to establish dialogue between African-Americans and Native Americans. This goes back to her earlier theater productions in Texas with the Sojourner Theatre, I believe. I knew that about LeAnne fairly early on. Being a southerner, she is willing to talk about things that southeastern peoples don’t – the disparate histories between the Native cultures that were removed and the smaller populations that were left behind.

RL: Would you say that this troupe is based in a community?

DH: Do you mean a location like Iowa City? I would say it is based in a family of cultural communities that have historically shared a common experience. Southeastern peoples. I heard a Navajo boy once refer to our group as the Five Tribes Collective. By that, he was referring to the more commonly recognized confederacies that stick out in people’s minds who know history. Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, Cherokee. Course the Cherokee were a different language community, but commonly shared cultural characteristics. Religion, economy, even within competitive histories. We had a Chickasaw member, Jody Bird, who was a graduate student at the University of Iowa. LeAnne and Scott are both Choctaw. Oklahoma Choctaw. Creek. I think Steve Thunder is like Seminole and Cherokee. Claire is Oklahoma Cherokee. We are very much an Okie troupe in one sense. Justin is Mohawk. Justin and LeAnne are very close. I guess you would say a kind of adopted son, in a sense. I was so proud of him because he was willing to play a gay character. A young man in his early 20s. I thought a bit brave. And he did it respectfully. I remember two or three times in the character rehearsals he would develop a mannerism and he would say "Okay, do you think this is authentic? Is it respectful? Is it going to offend people, and if so, explain why so I can understand?" That was one of the things I appreciated about him. When he was asking my opinion as a gay person, he would ask, "Why is this going too far, why do you think this is disrespectful?"

RL: I can only imagine now the possibility that you would have similar issues crossing boundaries between southeastern cultures and western cultures within the Indian?

DH: There are some major controversies. There is a tension that has been only heightened by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the last, let’s say from about the time when the Bureau of Indian Affairs was moving from the War Department to the Department of the Interior. You defined as non-Indian, or of a lesser status by exclusion, those peoples primarily in the eastern third of the United States whose military conflicts had been resolved prior to the War between the States. Therefore, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs was numbering peoples systematically, to order its relationship with Native peoples were not being included. Originally this was an effort to control Indians and control Indian governments by controlling individuals. You went from a terminology legally in the courts that referred to Native nations in the 1880’s to tribes. Tribes under international norms do not have the inherent sovereignty and inherent autonomy. So, you had a political shift, basically, as the United States realized we’ve got these mopping-up organizations, we have effective military control within our borders of the areas that we understand to be the United States. We have the title transfer through treaties that we need to defend our title before other global, especially colonial, powers whether it is France or Germany or Great Britain – or whomever else has had a foothold in what we understand to be our possessions within the United States. We had a vignette that referred back to the fact that German principalities in the 19th century were still making overtures to western peoples looking for treaty relationships. The United States had been saying loudly ever since the Revolution, "You can’t deal with our lesser, domestic nations. We are going to govern this land and you shouldn’t be making treaties with them. We won’t allow them to make treaties with you. We don’t recognize your right to come into our backyard and negotiate treaties where you might gain international recognition as having sovereignty we’ve determined will become ours".

RL: In developing your piece, or in struggling to go from one audience to another, would you talk about or infer changes in behavior, the way that you might have with Justin over gay behavior?

DH: Let me see if I understand. Are you asking if we adapted our behavior to audiences?

RL: Yeah. Or did you adjust the play as you looked at authenticity. Inevitably when you work with satire or humor you are right on the edge between effective satire and offense.

DH: We tried at times, individuals or the cast collectively tried at times to evoke thought, which meant we recognized we could offend. We were not consciously seeking to offend as our stated goal. We tried to balance a fine line between being provocative and evocative, rather than merely setting the stage for reactionary responses, either within ourselves or our audience. There were certainly political issues that some cast members felt very strongly about. In international relationships – identifying with Palestinians and the Palestinian relationship to the Israeli majority. Could, in New York for example, we participate having larger numbers of politically sensitive Jewish audience members? Could we have dropped the vignette about Israel? We could have. Did we? I don’t know. I believe we had that in our performances. Did we have questions at different times, often very confused questions, about what does being Indian have to do with the Palestinian issue? Yes.

RL: I lived through a very difficult moment in which a friend of mine who is a satirist portrayed a Baptist Sunday school teacher teaching her Sunday school of white children a prayer. It was in satire of bigotry. A big controversy came up because it wasn’t clear whether it was laughing at bigotry or using bigotry to laugh, if I can make that distinction. At one point someone said "There is no love of the woman in your performance." It was a criticism. As a satirist, she needed to have compassion and understanding for the woman she was playing. She was playing it from a position of despising the woman. She had no room for her as a human being in her own self and that was evident in the performance. I am characterizing a rather bitter wrangle. I am just wondering, I just think it is somehow related to what you are talking about. When you deal with satire, if you somehow get close to the bone, you can go over to the other side – particularly when there is a question of is this authentic or am I just lampooning for a laugh at the other.

DH: There was a time in rehearsal when Justin and a couple of the other male cast members were testing material and I thought they went too far. I felt they had reduced a very human character to character. I stopped them. Actually, Justin turned around and looked at me and stopped and we had that discussion. I explained why. I said, "You created a bitter character and you are enjoying yourself at the expense of the character." This is not believable to me. This is telling me more about how straight males think about gay males than how gay males might interact in this situation. I said, "You are showing me more about you in your own situation of manhood." Justin was always amenable, respectfully amenable to learning, and I felt like he was very professional as well. He is a decent person and he wanted to give an authentic telling performance. He didn’t have that sort of brittle, drag-queen quality, in my opinion, and I assure you that I’ve been somewhat active in gay/lesbian issues before. I would not have hesitated to speak up. I know I had some lesbians who were hearing about the performance and had not seen it who asked me, "Don’t you feel uncomfortable with this man playing this role?" And I said no, that I respect Justin because he respects me as a person. I feel comfortable. If there is something he is doing and I am not comfortable I will tell him. If it is in the middle of the play I would pull him back in the wings. Again, it evolved so that the relationship between that character and my character evolved spontaneously and we kept it largely as having a familial relationship. That was part of what I wanted to do. I felt good about that, since our families include persons within Native cultures or the dominant cultures that have been marginalized or are marginalized. Our families are very broad. I thought that was very important. We brought up issues around spouse abuse, substance abuse and sexuality that are just touchy subjects in most cultures. We wanted to bring them out. I think that if we had any dissatisfactions when we were trying to do rewrites of all of this, it was in the times when we were trying to do too much. We tried to offer too much complexity in a vignette and we realized that we would lose any message if we took a shotgun approach, and we would lose any message if we tried to take the audience on an emotional cannonball. Sometimes we had to simplify and shorten or we would risk losing any coherent message. We might have gotten laughter, but we would not have had the sense of conversation being created. We are hoping that the audience members are talking to our characters in their minds. That they are becoming engaged. I am not saying that we never refer to ourselves as actors. LeAnne was very careful about that. "You are performers, you are performers." Someone asked how we would know the difference between performing and acting. She said, "You are an actor when other people call you an actor. You should call yourselves performers until you achieve the kind of recognition when other actors recognize you as one of their own." We are performers. That was also a little helpful for the little ego things. Get brought down to earth. "Big fish in a small pond" syndrome can come on.

RL: Some ways of making theater include the playwright writing the play, and then they get the producer, and director, and hire the actors and make the play. The actors have the responsibility to learn lines and understand the character, and if they are lucky, be able to talk with the playwright. But they don’t go around creating text or building more scenes. That is not done in certain ways of making theater. In this particular case, you are talking about a play that has come in, been done before and the cast gets together and they start creating new scenes, new text and you get engaged with the message – the reason for doing the play to begin with. And you make challenging changes on how you make the play based on what you intend.

DH: Mm-hm. Sometimes we had spontaneous adaptations during a performance. Very literally, there were times when people deviated from the script and tossed in lines or changed the footing. The other cast members had to adapt.

RL: What did you all do to make that possible – to not make that a negative, but rather a positive aspect of your work?

DH: Hands-on-hips discussions afterwards. "Why did you do this? You threw my timing off. I didn’t recognize what you were doing. Okay, I could see it, but I wasn’t prepared for it." Those long, drawn out, "we are going to reach consensus about how we do this" discussions. When necessary, arbitration by LeAnne. I think also people tended to defer to Steve Thunder. Scotty died last year. Scott was a practicing lawyer, internationally recognized with environmental law and Native issues. She would drive up from Oklahoma to Chicago or wherever we were performing. Those are long drives. LeAnne would drive down there to collaborate. So, there was a lot of e-mail and telephone discussions taking place. I remember some discussions where Scotty participated by telephone while people were sitting around on the floor in the living room of a cast member’s house discussing.

RL: And Scotty was not in the company?

DH: Scotty was in the company. Scotty was not in every performance, because again, she was distant. There were times when she was in Washington working, or she would come in sometimes from Oklahoma.

RL: But she would come in sometimes as a mediator?

DH: She would come in sometimes as a performer. Scotty’s character is Lowake Harris, an Indian attorney at law. Scotty was a graduate of the University of Iowa Law School and an Oklahoma Choctaw with whom LeAnne had a long personal relationship with, a friendship and collaboration as Choctaws on issues and advocacy within the Oklahoma Choctaw Nation. If I was you, I would ask LeAnne about Scotty. They were quite sincere community activists among their own people. Scotty’s writing had mostly been legal essays and commentaries. We had a collaboration that was not an "Indian Radio Days" script. It was a script that was developed for the Iowa Women’s Music and Comedy Festival that involved all WagonBurner cast members, women, and was presented under Princess Productions. I guess you could say that Princess Productions was my little production moniker. It was again a script that I had outlined that was developed to present Native women’s issues at the Iowa Women’s Music and Comedy Festival. It was a time where we learned more from the audience’s reactions that we didn’t anticipate. Basically, we presented it as though it was a workshop. But the workshop was on how non-Native women could respectfully use Native spiritualities.

[interview interrupted by street fight]

...we chose costumes that we felt represented obvious, recognizable characters. The proselytizing missionary, the young Indian radical, the New Age princess, the Native audience member who is pragmatic and questioning. We set the stage with a makeshift – this was an outdoor festival, so they had large tents for workshops and presentations that were anticipated to be smaller. We had probably 30 chairs out, and 30 minutes before this workshop was to start those chairs were filled. They were trying to bring more chairs. What was really surprising was that we had LeAnne Howe playing the missionary, what she called the Bible Thumper. I was the Princess Wanna Buck character, brought in from "Indian Radio Days." The Princess Wanna Buck character was a New Age evangelist commercializing mix-matched riffs of Indian spiritualities for consumption by a non-Native audience. A play-off of a character like you would find with the Bear Tribe or one of these other faux Indian religions. So, Princess Wanna Buck, in "Indian Radio Days" and the workshop both, wore a necklace made out of gummy bears and rock candy, a chicken feather headdress (like a child’s chicken feather headdress with all the colors that you can find at Walmart), and literally glittered. I remember my glitter-freak days back in the ’70s when I was going to high school. That kind of an outfit. And I would come out, going to sell Indian spirituality. Discounts for family groups.

We brought that in there, set up an altar that had the gummy bears, rock candy and chicken feathers like a feather duster to clean away the bad spirits and so forth. We thought people would recognize the spoof. Instead what happened, we were going through our play and we thought we would spend maybe eight or 10 minutes at the max with characters interacting, and then trying to draw the audience in, and then turning it over for an open audience discussion. What actually happened was that we carried the play over for 20 minutes before we stopped it with increasing engagement with audience members. Only two or three people got up and left. And two or three people at the end began to question. The people did not recognize, despite the exaggeration, despite the symbolism. You had a number of women who fully bought into the characterization. We could have questioned if we were brilliant performers and writers. Instead what we had to do was to recognize that very sincere people could be so vastly misinformed and yet sincerely enamored of their stereotyping of Indians that we could not begin a conversation as satire. The few who left had recognized that they were being spoofed and they left because they were angry. They felt short-changed because, as one woman said, she had come specifically to the festival for that workshop. They wanted to learn how to use Indian spiritualities as non-Native women and felt short-changed. They felt mocked and unhappy. I think one woman stormed out indignantly. They complained later to the organizers.

We called it to a halt when the interaction between the young Indian radical and Princess Wanna Buck was getting fairly heated. The audience members were joining in. One woman jumped up when I said – I don’t remember how I said it, ’cause we were in total improvisation after the first eight minutes of script was gone – she jumped up and ran off and brought back some of the women volunteers who were working security to have this woman evicted because she was threatening this wise Indian elder who was coming to draw non-Native women into the fold of Indian spirituality and bring them to a higher level of consciousness. Here was this young radical who was threatening. When the security came walking up with their walkie-talkies and a couple of nice, agitated women with them, that is when we put it to a halt.

LeAnne and Claire and Jody and I discussing it later had not anticipated that gummy bears were going to be mistaken and accepted to that degree. Here you had these really nice women, highly educated, most of whom were feminists, many of whom identified as lesbians, who were so eager to find this acceptance with Native women and show respect, as they understood it, for Native women and cultures and have this experience. They could not suspend their belief and move into disbelief or humor. We weren’t getting laughs. We were getting these serious responses and people were taking notes and discussing with each other. Here was LeAnne, she looked like a missionary from the ’20s with this very prim high-button suit and carrying this large, heavy, bound book thumping on chairs. And the young radical Indian kid with the jeans and a torn shirt and a feather in her cap. They just bought into the archetypes too readily, too many women.

Then we had a discussion. Then actually the workshop became more of a workshop, an interactive discussion on issues that carried over so long that eventually the festival organizers had to send back security to ask us to leave the space for the next workshop. That was a spin-off where we took characters from "Indian Radio Days," a collaboration. I wanted to do this. We later reprised it for some campuses around the area. We did a presentation with Brenda Farnell’s classes at the University of Illinois about a year later. That was not what we anticipated. What did we learn most about? Did we learn most about gullibility? I think we learned most that very sincere people can do very outrageous, hurtful acts that demean Native individuals and Native cultures in the name of respect, in the name of intercultural understanding. I remember one of the festival organizers said, "Please, if you do any more plays for us, please state firmly that you are doing a satire. You don’t have to name the play, but at least take the space and label it satire." We didn’t anticipate that.

RL: It sounds to me that the history of WagonBurner is the history of people who have a very common understanding of style, of intention. I suspect, just out of my own experience, that a lot of that is the result of how that grew together. Looking back, at this point, do you see practices, things that you did together, that allowed you to find that commonality of vision and allowed you to be collaborators, where under other circumstances you might have come apart at the seams? Things you might have done to keep the spirit alive there, keep yourselves respecting each other?

DH: Certainly LeAnne’s direction. And our willingness to sit down over coffee – actually, being southern I think we drink more ice tea and Coca-Colas. We sit down, not only as collaborators but as friends and neighbors, and be vulnerable enough to be honest with each other and risk offending each other – as performers or as script writers or as individuals. We didn’t have a common understanding of what it meant to be Native. We did more, but we still had differences. Looking at the backgrounds of some of the core group, you had LeAnne and Scott who were raised in Native communities. Claire and Justin were Natives who – I guess this is really Justin’s story to tell, but as young children had been adopted and raised by non-Native families and then reaching adulthood had sought out Native communities and mentors and created new family and friend support groups.

I was born into the last generation of legal segregation in a college town, went through desegregation. My understanding of being Indian was created through my father’s and grandmother’s stories, largely. It became flesh and spirit for me as an older teenager when I had a license, had a car and had permission from my parents to drive down to south Alabama where there were Indian communities and establish contacts with distant relatives, create friendships, take a job working with the community. I created a summer cultural program for Creek youth and worked with that for two or three summers. I was living, for summers and then times throughout the year in college, in a Creek community, so I became a part of a rural Creek folk culture, then later moved into a Creek traditional culture. With contacts from that community, I moved into a traditional community in eastern Oklahoma. As that evolved, I re-emerged among Alabama Creeks. Where there had not been a traditional ceremonial community within Alabama for 100 years, now there is the first generation that has been raised by traditional parents as a life perspective and a spiritual expression. So for me, Indian-ness, moving from the abstraction of the stories without a community context into a rural folk community and then into a traditional community has been a progression that is still evolving for me. My perspective in that was a little different. In south Alabama Indians were segregated. There were times when I remember being a poll watcher. Indian candidates running for offices like sheriff and standing out at the polls counting heads, assuming that if an Indian went in, that Indian should be voting for Indians. I was going to the courthouse as a young person to challenge racial designations on a driver’s license to see that Indians were identified as Indians and not by an "X." "X" was a category used in Alabama which means "racial designation contested or unknown" – if you didn’t fit neatly into a category. Those were evolving experiences for me. Under segregation, it made me face social censure as a youth. Then in my late teens and early adulthood, moving into the Native communities there, I saw that desegregation was just then occurring. I had that experience to live and to learn.

RL: Did you decide on particular formal ways to bring this kind of analysis into formal discussion?

DH: When you say "formal session" do you mean did we introduce those types of concerns as a topic? How do we discuss this and how do we present it? Yes.

RL: How would that discussion be led?

DH: Over hours of meandering discussions, returning back to the thread. Sometimes heated discussions. Offering, drafting characters and plots on a yellow note pad as we were speaking and then playing them back, acting them out, discarding, offering suggestions and moving on and agreeing to come back and meet again another time. Maybe having a really exciting meeting and then coming back the next day, sleep-weary and bleary and coming back with revisions to offer.

RL: That is beautiful. Do you feel that is an effective way to do, or would you find that there are other ways that you would have done?

DH: Are you saying "effective ways" in terms of if we had a deadline and we need to efficiently use our human resources to meet that deadline? Say we are putting a proposal forward for a reviewer or a funder – no, that would not be effective. But if you are saying "effective" in terms of retaining that authentic voice – yes. The conversations we hoped to evoke with audiences come from the conversations we had among ourselves. So, we were trying to extend in some way onto the stage what we were creating among ourselves. Understand too, there we were this handful of southern and eastern Native persons in a small Native community that was primarily western peoples or northern peoples, who again didn’t always interact harmoniously. Within the little Indian community there within Iowa City we were trying to create our own niche. We were trying to create for ourselves a sense of belonging or continuity. Those were ironies that would play back into the stage. LeAnne and Scotty had their own sense of what it meant to be Choctaw in a Choctaw language community. We had other cast members who had a strong sense of what it meant to be Indian, but it was rooted in that intertribal pow-wow community that develops in urban communities but has now spread as an archetype of Indian-ness, especially in the south and the east where you have so many deculturated rural communities.

I was becoming more and more of the fervent traditionalist and had this sense that "Golly gee, we should all just be stomp dancers." I was eager to haul everybody down to the stomp grounds and confer it to everyone overnight. That is not what everyone else was eager to have happen. I had those perspectives. I think that Scott and LeAnne and I had lived as Natives within – eastern Oklahoma is referred to as "Little Dixie" because that is where the southern people’s homelands were relocated. You can drive through and see these Native-looking faces and it is jarring sometimes for people who don’t expect to hear these strong southern accents ripped right out of the deep south. So much of southern dialectal English derives from the Muskogean language family. The extensive use of diphthong – "y’all," all that – comes from the Creek, Choctaw, Seminole languages. So, you go there now you see these folks looking like Geronimo’s granddaughter sitting in a service station, and then you go into eastern Oklahoma, "Little Dixie" where the five tribes are concentrated, and you hear those accents. Those deep south accents.

So, we had those, and we had the non-Native cast members. There was some question early on, are we were going to evolve as more of a Native-centered production or are we more expansive, that is, more multicultural, where that is one aspect but not the main focus? Are we going to be more of an Iowa multicultural theater troupe or more of a Native-centered theater troupe? I think that a couple of the non-Native cast members had hoped that it would evolve into more of a multicultural, but the Native cast members strongly wanted to keep it both Native and southern-centered. I wish I would have seen the production. I would have loved to have seen so many of those western Indians trying to interpret a southern experience and southern sense of humor. May I ask you something?

RL: Yes, please.

DH: Is this along the lines of what you anticipated?

RL: Absolutely. Well, I didn’t know what you would say by any stretch of the imagination, but the conversation is everything I could have hoped for. This is just terrific.

DH: I am very pleased. I was very happy when I learned that you would have opportunity to speak with different cast members. It would be alarming to me if I had been the only person you had a chance to speak to.

RL: I understand that LeAnne gathered some people together this last fall at Rosebud, and what I hope to do is find people who were a part of that experience and perhaps go to Rosebud.

DH: See, that’s what I am speaking of. I would love to see them interpret our experience. They are so very different. Pipe-carrying peoples. A relatively recent conquest relationship. A strong sense of Indian-ness that is not centered in southern traditions. I was very curious about how did they interpret the Bingo Lady?

RL: Did they do the show?

DH: Yes. She was drawing cast members from that area. That is something we talked about. What would happen if we had a bunch of Lakotas interpreting our play, which in a sense is interpreting our experiences for us because so much of it we tried to bring in was southern.

RL: Oh that is great! This absolutely confirms it, I’ve got to go out there and talk with people who were in the show.

DH: That happened once before in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum when the play won the script-writing contest, a new Native playwright’s script-writing contest. Many entries. I think ours was one of three that won from entries from Canada and the United States. The Mark Taper Forum used professional cast members from that area to perform. They brought in the primary playwrights; we were all wailing and whining because they didn’t fly eleven people out there. They flew LeAnne and, I think, Roxy out there. We were all like, "Well, you should take us." I remember saying, "The Bingo Lady is improv, you should take me." Of course that is not the way it worked. They used actors that you see in television and movies to perform and do their interpretations. Again, I didn’t get to see that. We all pestered LeAnne incessantly: "How did they play me?" So, those are the two primary times which wasn’t drawn from the roster.

Native theater is emerging now as intermission fillers at pow-wow competitions, small stages where you have Indian colleges reviving an old history of Native theater ton a western proscenium stage that emerged with the boarding schools during the 19th century. Then they were usually Indians performing plays that had "advancement of western civilization" themes, indoctrination themes or morality plays, religious plays, passion-type plays for the churches. With southern peoples at one time, you had Alexander Posey and all the writers who were writing in Creek and writing in Choctaw and presses that were alive and theater movements that were alive, especially in eastern Oklahoma. For the southern peoples, with statehood and the diminishment of control over Native institutions by Native governments, there was a homogenization of education with a western model, and all that ended very abruptly. You didn’t have the presses and you didn’t have people who were studying in Muskogee or Choctaw or whatever. That was largely lost, Cherokee and Muskogee. It is a shame. Now LeAnne speaks Choctaw. Scotty, I believe, spoke Choctaw. I think I came to adulthood knowing one work in Muskogee, maybe two. I remember a great aunt using it. Muskogee I learned through the stomp-ground learning for prayers and songs and ceremonies. Do I speak it? No. Do I have some understanding of it? Yes. If you start changing tenses I am lost. Please don’t start changing tenses with me; there are too many and they are too complex. With a Native speaker, I can carry on a decent conversation with a three-year-old, if the three-year-old is not too sophisticated. I am willing to bet that Claire learned more Ojibway than she did Cherokee, because she was living and working as an adult in Ojibway communities. But that was one thing that LeAnne always insisted, that we have some lines that are presented in Native languages; it was usually Choctaw. She was absolutely adamant that the audience hear something other than English.

RL: Do you think that WagonBurner could come back to more full swing?

DH: I think it will and I’ll tell you why. First, outside of that being a stated intention, which can just be wishful thinking, I believe that there is a core group of cast members that has maintained not only personal communication but that sense of vision. I know that several times LeAnne and I have communicated around this stuff of characters and script possibilities. I know that LeAnne communicates with Justin fairly frequently, and I believe along the same lines at times. I spoke with Steve Thunder back a few years ago about some of that. I think that LeAnne always says that as we are passing through different phases of our lives. What we are trying to do is reach certain goals, and we have to spend our time and energy focusing on those personal goals, but as we do that we will be reaching that plateau. We are all coming back in the next year or so to having what is a great leisure in life. Time to interact with each other and work out the logistics. We did have times when we were performing. We flew into different parts of the country to perform in latter days with the cast. I remember LeAnne contacting me about doing some plays, but I had situations where I couldn’t leave. So, that is a very telling phrase. That we will return on "Indian time," not just a put off, Bob.

I know that I have Indian associations where we have been having a conversation; one we’ve been having pretty much annually is through the Two Spirit Gatherings. We’ve been discussing issues of common concern now that I’ve been a part of for 11 years. So, we haven’t reached a resolution in Indian time. Those conversations are ongoing. I believe that the theater is – we are at points in our lives where what I can hear is that Claire will be returning from Kosovo, Justin is more established now and is not a newlywed, LeAnne and Jim, in terms of their different career interests meeting a common point. My partner was going to graduate school at GW and is completing an internship that takes her down south with the public-health service and we anticipate living under the same roof again within the next year. My educated guess would be that within the next year or so the pace will pick up, ’cause I know that questions have been coming up about what are we going to do with this script, as well as proposals for other plays.

RL: I have to say that the way you guys work over time is, for me, very important for people to recognize and to honor. The funding community, of course, wants to have the framework of a theater be designed by its season, or by its budget, or by some other kind of identifiable, tangible sequence of things. That is not how people necessarily make art. That is not necessarily how artists communicate with the community they are working with, and it is really important for people who are coming up to know that. In my own case, I am a teaching students to at least consider having a career in the theater. Well, what does that mean? For some it means spending 90% of their time waiting tables in New York and hoping for a role. What do they do in the meantime? How are they making their theater? How are they advancing themselves? The fact that you weave in personal goals within the framework of your connection with your castmates as an accepted practice, that is important for people to hear.

DH: See, what I appreciate talking with you is that you see what we understand in our own lives as practical negotiations, how we can keep bread on the table and the toilet flushing until we are enable to produce our art, other people see as "Oh, you are no longer a theater troupe." One of my friends that I am having dinner with tonight is forming a talent show at her church. She is a really fine musician. She used to be on faculty with one of the university music programs. She said, "Oh you used to be in theater." And I said I am still in theater. She said "Well what have you performed? You haven’t performed in a few years." I said I performed this week. I was reprimanded by my principal because she came by and I was standing on a table in my classroom with my students rolling on the floor as we were trying to act out verb tenses. I had them jumping off their chairs trying to find jump, jumped, jumps, jumping. Act it out. My viewpoint is that I am performing. I need insurance, I need an income. Now, would I rather that I was on a proscenium stage performing jump, jumped, jumping, jumps with my old theater troupe? Yes. Who wrote the job references for me? LeAnne. Steve. Scott. My theater troupe members. And what did they understand? Well, I need insurance, I need an income. Why did I get a job when I needed insurance? I tried out to get a job with a professional Native theater troupe. I think I could say that I progressed along, but I did not get it. I know there were some concerns expressed that I didn’t look Indian enough for a part. I can’t change that. This is who I am, this is where I am. I had this terrible sinus infection and I couldn’t get a darn doctor to see me. I waved my credit card. I pulled out cash. I couldn’t get anyone to see me. I needed insurance. So I looked in the paper. There were job interviews that day. I went to the last 30 minutes of job interviews where the District was hiring teachers. I have a teaching background. I wrote programs, I wrote curriculum. I got a job. Was it my first, second or third choice? No. Do I think I am very good at it? Yes. I wish my principal shared that perspective. I know that she has expressed great dismay that Ms. Hicks does not developed mature teaching methods. The converse of that is Ms. Hicks is unorthodox in her teaching methods. Well, by God, my students are learning to read and write somewhat in standardized English, and can now distinguish between jumped and jumping. I apparently do that better on the stage when it is defined as the stage than in the classroom, which, from my viewpoint, is the stage. So, like I say, I’ve been storytelling several times, oddly enough, it has been in les/bi/gay venues because within the Two Spirit circuit, our gay Indian gatherings, there has always been a night for performances and I have a little stage. Sometimes with les/bi/gay things, I get called up because I have this reputation as a storyteller. So, for me, those have been venues that have been easy for me, to have a periodic opportunity for expression that I could work in with my schedule. I’ve had some other more formal things that had paychecks involved, but it conflicted with my need to go to work and get a paycheck and have my insurance and be in this area so that I could receive my medical treatments. So, there have been more lucrative venues that I’ve had to turn down. I remember e-mailing LeAnne about four months ago. I said, "Well, LeAnne, I’m going crazy. I’m ready for a play. Is anything in sight immediately?" No. She e-mailed me back and I remember the line. It said "Debbie, WagonBurner will perform again. Remember it is on Indian time. Love, LeAnne."

RL: I have one other area of discussion, and that is partnerships with communities. This can be anything from funders, to sponsors of performance, to people that you might gather with in order to develop a script. Do you have any stories or references about that? The other part of that question is who organizes that? How is that done?

DH: LeAnne did that and also to an extent Judy Morrison. I think LeAnne has always been the primary contact person.

RL: Who is Judy Morrison?

DH: She was a cast member. Her and her daughter.

RL: Native?

DH: Yes. Cherokee. Live in the Iowa City area. I think over time it is more LeAnne, and maybe LeAnne and Justin. We had some contacts through Steve Thunder because he had a national reputation as a storyteller already established. I think some people that might be good for you to speak with would be the men who own and run CSPS Theatre in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where we did our Quincentennial project that was up-linked with public radio, and I think the Alaska Native Network picked that up. CSPS is an experimental theater in, of all places, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It is really quite good. The owners are a couple who are very lovingly committed to brining edgy and unconventional theater to the mid-Iowa area. In fact I believe their apartment is above the theater. They own the building. It is in one of those near-the-river warehousey areas that is gentrifying. They provided the first professional stage in the Midwest for WagonBurner. They’ve been quite extraordinary bringing musicians and performers into Iowa. That is my fond memory of my $15 check. The first time I got paid. I think Brenda Farnell – who is an anthropologist, I think now with the University of Illinois, a British woman, actually quite unusual, a noted and rather radical theorist, although you wouldn’t know that by her demeanor, who speaks some Native languages and signs some Native languages and has a clear understanding of humor and satire from an anthropological perspective within human societies – I think Brenda brought me and a couple of other people over at a time when they were developing their archives there. They had Spiderwoman Theatre performing. She also had brought us into her classrooms at the University of Iowa to perform for her anthropology grad students, so that the excerpts of the play could serve as a site for discussion about humor and social negotiation. I think highly of her. There are not many people that are non-Native that can function so comfortably in non-Native societies. I believe those would be two especially good people. As far as another Native person you might talk to Susan Powers, who is I guess Dakota. Sioux. She is a writer and I believe she lives in Chicago now. Susan was one of those people who is a very keen writer, a very honest critic and certainly provided some critiques of our play as it evolved that were very helpful from a professional viewpoint, as well as coming from a Native critic.

RL: Did you have much critical response?

DH: I would say Susan, and her mother Susan Powers Sr., because they are both writers who had an Iowa City connection. She had been at the writer’s workshop, I believe. She was a friend and associate of LeAnne’s and periodically was able to be in some area where we were performing and see and review. She is much more widely read than LeAnne. LeAnne is one of the most under-read Native writers, or women writers, in the United States today, in my opinion. And part of that is that her fiction and her essays are what she writes best, or are what she is most well noted for, but she writes on so many different cultural levels simultaneously and the culture she writes about are so poorly known. Things go right over people’s heads. You have this context for Indian-ness that she has known and she has lived historically and it just doesn’t fit into people’s minds about what it means to be an Indian. Mound building societies, confederacies, large agricultural urban populations. That just doesn’t fit into people’s minds about what it means to be Indian. I think it is sort of like those Indian writers who started writing about living in urban ghettos, and they are writing about an experience that is not known and not highly marketable because publishers look at it and say, "This doesn’t meet our idea of Indian." When they hear "Indian" they have a clear expectation for feathers and pipes and pomp and tragedy. If you don’t have a teepee in the background, people view it as not believable. It was very hard for us to get bookings from major theaters. We would get this response back: "This doesn’t look Indian to us." So, I think Susan would be valuable.

Robert H. Leonard is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at Virginia Tech where he teaches directing and improvisation. He brings 30 years of experience as founding artistic director of the Road Company, a nationally recognized theater ensemble (1972-1998) based in Johnson City, Tennessee, which created and produced two dozen original plays reflecting the history and issues of the Upper Tennessee Valley and Central Appalachia. Leonard served as a site visitor for WagonBurner Theater Troop for "Performing Communities," and currently serves as a member of the national board of Theatre Communications Group.

PERFORMING COMMUNITIES
Carpetbag | Cornerstone | Dell'Arte | Jump-Start
LAPD | Pregones | Roadside | WagonBurner
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