Interview with Rosebud residency participants Nancy Whitehorse and Dee Antoine; and Jeff Kellogg director of theater for Sinte Gleska University Art Institute

By Robert Leonard

Nancy Whitehorse: It was fun. It really was. Just to be able to write thoughts and feelings down and have someone not say that it wasn’t right. And you weren’t told that won’t fit. They just typed it on in. People worked together and got it going. Everybody’s idea meant something.

Robert Leonard: Ensemble, or collaborative, or sharing participation is a skill. We are looking at what things people do in order to make that happen right, and happen positively. I know that you guys have written these plays. The class is working on them?

Dee Antoine: The "Rosebud" one.

NW: Oh yeah?

DA: We wanted to get you involved with us even though you weren’t in the classes. We wanted you to come in and I guess stretch it out, with some ideas to make it longer. We will be going somewhere, or entering it into a contest, and if we win the contest, we get to go down there and read it. I’m pretty sure that if you helped, he would get you to come down, too. We were just talking about it in class. We kind of had some ideas about adding some more on to it. I think he has a time set aside for people to come in and work it out.

NW: That should be fun. There are a lot of possibilities for that.

DA: There is so much information in this one play. A lot of it could be stretched. All the different people and that. We have a copy of it, too.

RL: And "Rosebud" is one of the pieces that you worked on?

NW: Yeah.

DA: I think she had a lot of input onto it. I like the ideas that you put into it. I basically think that you wrote the majority of the play. Your ideas. The Hare Krishnas passing out flowers were her ideas.

NW: It was really fun to sit down and just have everyone throw something out. Somebody would say something real timid and right away it was right there, typed in. I would say something. I was trying to be funny and they wrote it in there. They actually took my sense of humor seriously. When we actually performed it over here the audience was enjoying it. The audience participation in it – we had a couple of little break dancers from the community come in. It was a big involvement, a lot of people.

RL: In the workshop, where did you meet? In this room? What was it like?

DA: Right here. Yeah. We just sat in a circle and she asked where we wanted to start. No one knew where to start, so we just started throwing out ideas and she started writing them in. She had a laptop. Basically whatever came out of our mouth went on to the screen. It just worked out that way. My mother read it and she really didn’t understand it at all. I can’t remember what kind of play she said it was, but it was the kind of play that didn’t have any certain order or climax. She wasn’t understanding the concept of it being just sporadic information. What was that called?

Jeff Kellogg: The episodic structure of "Rosebud"? It is very episodic.

DA: She really didn’t understand the way that it was put together. I was trying to help her understand that it wasn’t a reading play, it was a performing play.

JK: It was an accumulation of ideas that had come out of these short scenes. Did you talk about where the idea for the play came from, with the woman doing "Citizen Kane"?

NW: That was our opening scene.

DA: Actually, I think she was talking about it first, but there was hardly anybody that knew about the movie. They got a hold of it somehow and showed it in class. She was showing the part where he was saying "rosebud" in the movie and not really knowing what the significance was, giving us an example of where to start from. Have something in a play where you just whisper it or whatever and have the play basically surround around it. Around this one phrase or something. Just from there it sparked.

NW: – plus the Hearst family had made their money off the Black Hills.

DA: And how the Hearst daughter got kidnapped and stuff and it was surrounded around her. She was going around looking for the answer. No, she was coming out of the bank saying "S and L" or something like that.

JK: Patty Hearst is actually a character in the play. After we had viewed the play and done some research, as they said, we found out that the Hearst family bought out the people who had discovered the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills. Which was the largest gold mine in the world at the time. That all happened prior to the battle of Little Bighorn, after which the Lakota people were forced to give up the hills. That was the whole starting point from which we began to write.

RL: Did the location of the project in a particular historical frame happen in the workshop?

DA: Certain things that have happened in the community over the years. Different religions try to come in and help poor Indians and stuff like that. That was a major part of the play. How we all have different reactions or different experiences with the religious people that came here. They used to come and pick us up on a bus and take us out to a church out there. We would do puppet shows or whatever. There is a scene in here where she is sending all her kids off to the Mormons. They are taking a busload of kids.

NW: Up in North Dakota the Mormons came in a took by the busloads everybody’s child and took them up to Utah. Some of them have never come back because they were converted, but the ones that do don’t really know who or what they are because they have a balance of the Mormon side and their own Lakota traditions, beliefs and cultures that they’ve been told are a savage Pagan way. They’ve been told that unless they converted their soul was going to go to hell. You would stay a lowly savage for the rest of your life. So that is the injection of Christianity.

JK: Not just that, you brought the Hare Krishna story into the play.

NW: Hare Krishnas and Jehovah Witnesses and break dancers...

RL: How did you find the people for the workshop?

DA: They were all just in the class.

JK: I had two classes that semester. I had the Introduction to Native American Theatre class, which is basically a literary – we use those books I gave you copies of. Then I had another class called Development of Native American Theatre in Tribal Communities, which is a class that is based on looking at traditional performance modes like pow-wow dancing, storytelling, as well as some contemporary acting methods and then we make a synthesis. The whole point of the class is to study those things in the early part of the semester and then develop a community piece – take the ideas of the students and do a writing workshop and develop a piece. Because LeAnne was here we took advantage of her and we put her to work with the students from those two classes.

RL: Because they were a part of a class, there was an expectation about what you were going to be doing? You didn’t really know how that would happen? Am I right about that?

DA: Yeah.

RL: The first day that you came it was just like, "Okay, we’re here."

NW: That was basically it.

JK: We put it on the radio and invited community members to join us.

DA: He told us about it, and I was kind of anticipating being able to write a play. I did come and say "Yeah I’m here," but I also wanted to know how to write a play. I was participating.

JK: The whole first period of the class was tossing ideas around. I don’t even remember how we got the idea that we would watch "Citizen Kane" and go from there.

DA: The guy with the ponytail. He was on about some newsroom rhetoric. We just started talking about that and it led to that. I remember there being something in the paper about the Black Hills and the Hearsts, and then he started going on about the Hearsts. Then he told us about the movie and we all didn’t understand, so then I remember watching the movie, or parts of it anyways. I remember he was the one that started a conversation about it.

JK: That was Brad.

RL: Can you identify skills or things that you did with LeAnne that allowed for that to turn into a play.

NW: I think the only skills that we brought into working with LeAnne was our own personalities, and personal experiences. She didn’t sit down with a syllabus and say "This is how you write a play." It was just like throw your ideas out here. Nothing is bad.

DA: I think Brad put a lot of facts behind the conversation. There were other people who had other facts in it, but he was the one that started it. It wasn’t like it was planned that way, it was just that these people knew.

NW: The same idea came out in the end though. The point was that the hills aren’t for sale. I think everybody’s brainstorming is what led to that point. There were facts thrown around. People with all these ideas and concepts. Like she was saying, historical things just flying around this room. And what ever came out of your mouth was typed into the laptop. Pretty soon everyone was laughing and suggesting. It is like what he said, when you write just vomit on paper. And that is what we were doing with our heads. Anything that came out of our mouth.

JK: We had two laptops in here. LeAnne was running one and I was running the other. We would just let them talk and we would start typing. Then at the end of the day she and I would go up to the office and merge the two versions. Sometimes I would have heard something different in either a side conversation, or I got it slightly different from what she got it. Then we would bring it back to the group on paper and they would go "No, no, no...yes, yes, yes" and that would start a whole other session. She was here for three weeks total and we met three or four times per week for a couple hours at least. At all different times, depending on schedules. We were just real loose, but it worked real well. It was one of those things where there was a core group and then people moving in and out. Nancy was one of the core members, and so was Dee. They were here, I think, every time we wrote.

NW: That was fun for me to be able to have these crazy thoughts in my head, my concepts, and throw them out. Somebody liked them!

DA: For me, I didn’t know nothing about the Hearsts. It was very informative for me, the effects that some religions have on the older people. I didn’t know half of these things. I had some experiences with some of the things in the play; to hear their stories is a lot better to hear them than actually the play. It helps you to remember how they felt and think about how affected they are. I like all the information because it started me to be interested in the Hearst family and stuff. I never knew about them. That was pretty cool.

RL: What I am recognizing is that you are writing a play and you think the idea is to write the play, but there are so many other benefits if you open it like this. Everybody is gaining. Getting to learn with each other, to learn about what each other has to bring, different people in the community, and the history. That is actually pretty consistent with the findings that we are having with all the different ensembles that we are working with. We are not just talking about a product. As comfortable and fun as it may be, it is an important skill and process. Fun is part of the process. Learning is part of the process. At what point did you have something that you could begin making into a production?

NW: I think everyday was –

JK: Everyday we read what we had done in the previous session. That is how we would start the session. We would hand out what’s on paper now, read it. Sometimes we wouldn’t even get through the first page before we were actually writing again. The keyboards would start clicking. Sometimes we would have more than one session in a day. We went through a lot of paper. By the time we set the date for the public reading we had gone through it a lot. But, in my computer upstairs there are three or four versions with different dates on them. I don’t think we set the version we read to the public until the morning before we read it.

RL: And now you are in a process of taking that again to a production?

JK: We are revisiting it. I want Nancy to come and work with us if she has got the time.

NW: Oh, I have got the time.

JK: We are revisiting it because the Mid-America Theatre Conference theme this year is historically based theater from the viewpoint of the losers – in other words, using theater as a vehicle to correct the history books. I think this does that. I want the students to do some readings at the conference. I want to work on it and get it beefed up, straightened up, added to (‘cause they will accept up to a 30-page piece). The piece is six pages long, which really doesn’t sound like a lot, but with all the peripheral activities in there, it is a 20-minute piece. I would like to develop it further and send it to them for a possible one to be read at that conference. If it works out, I will take a group of students to St. Louis in March for that.

RL: Will you continue the same process in building this?

JK: Sure, because I have got a couple of people who are interested in doing this, who weren’t available before, who want to see the movie to understand where we are jumping off from. Then we will go at it again. In fact we’ve already gone at it. Dee has got some notes from yesterday’s class where we just started talking. The first question that I threw out to the class was, "Okay, we’ve got this character named Rosebud and she is in search of something. She goes out to different places on the reservation. There are a lot of places that people here go to. We don’t have a scene about going to those places yet." That is the first thing that we did, make a list of all these other possible scenes.

DA: And the details about the scenes. We started talking about the IHS and having to wait all day to get in and see the doctor.

NW: Or that if you have a problem in your life, right away the concept of the reservation is, "You need treatment. You need to go to codependency." Then you will be right on track.

DA: Or the police, how they are always losing paperwork, or they find old warrants somehow. And then we have the issue with our medicine man. We have Uncle Wannabuck, who wants to get paid for dances. Then we have Uncle Prayforfree. We are going to add a couple more characters.

JK: And give them their own scene. That was important to someone here yesterday. That came up in the discussions. "I heard so-and-so was selling some dance for $2,000." Someone had just met a German couple, and they were complaining that the cost had doubled since they were here last. So, that came into the discussion. We need a scene in this play that addresses that.

NW: Don’t they know God is free?

DA: Exactly. It was the same-type environment. We were just writing down notes. They were just putting out their experiences, talking about the time this happened to them. How the casino – how there is drama out there all the time and people know your business. How that affected them, how that affected their work. So, you learn about them as you are writing the play also. You get to know their personality a little more.

RL: At the end of three weeks you had a reading? Is that right? Who came?

NW: Just general public.

JK: The university president showed up. Quite a few elders. The way you get the word out here is that we have a once-a-week newspaper, which we had missed the deadline. So, what you do is you fax the information to the radio station. They put it out there for you. We put flyers everywhere. Put it on the e-mail for the university so that they would announce it to other classes. We had the student lounge full. It was in the room from last night. That room was full. We did it up on the narrow piece so that everyone could see. We probably had 80-100 people there. Two groups of readers because the creative writing class read theirs and our class read ours. We had people from all over. I, of course, have a list of people that I call who have been involved in different things. We had a good crowd.

NW: And they enjoyed it.

JK: Yeah. They were laughing. My only concern is sending it off to a place they may not get it because they haven’t been around here. I think they will.

DA: I’ve seen this time when an Indian comedian was doing a show and there was hardly anybody laughing. I was laughing, but a lot of the other ethnicities weren’t getting it. That is my only concern too.

JK: But that isn’t a reason not to engage with those audiences, either.

DA: They have to understand the difference. Where we live and where they live.

RL: Besides the natural and obvious excitement of having someone laugh at something you think is funny, what did you learn from the audience? Do you remember anything particular? It doesn’t have to be a big thing.

NW: I had some older relatives come up to me and say, "That was great. It was funny. I liked this part about it because that is what I remember." Especially with all these religions coming in. Their experiences were like that. Remembering the buses coming in and taking kids away. It brought back memories of all of this, but at the same time, they really liked the humor in all of it because it kind of detracts from the painful memories. Now later on in life when you look at it, it is kind of funny. A bunch of guys in suits coming up and saying, "We are going to take your children." And tons of parents crying. Making these parents think that they are not adequate. They’ll have food, new clothes, everything that a parent would want for a child. And they will take them. For them it brought back a lot of memories. They enjoyed it. They identified with it.

DA: Laughter is the best medicine. I think that is how a lot of people deal with it. For some of them it is hard for them to talk about it, but if they do it is in a joking manner. It is not too personal. I think the feeling right now is that people want to get them out there and deal with them. The Uncle Wannabuck and the Uncle Prayalot is referring to medicine men, some of whom are dipping into other people’s pocket to pay for sun dances. That is wrong in our tradition. People are bothered by that. The Mormons coming and taking the children away, they are bothered by that and they want some way to express it.

NW: And these people that come to these sun dances are more traditional than the full-bloods.

DA: The naturalists who think they know everything.

NW: They come in with some wicked looking costumes with feathers and chokers. I am full blood, and I don’t even dress like that. My idea of them is that they are trying to be more traditional than I as a full-blood. For them to take something sacred to me and my family and twist around for a show, or maybe they are trying to do it for some kind of spiritual gain, but at the same time they shouldn’t make a mockery of it. When you watch them dance, they are out there laughing. They are running to the tree. You are dancing. You are out there. It is a prayer, you know. And they are running to the tree. It is like a game for them. A novelty that they can take home. They can say, "I went to Rosebud. They took me out and put me out in the center." They don’t look at the spiritual importance of that, or the significance, the role of the man and the woman inside of something so sacred. It is just distorted. It makes me mad. At the same time too, if you could put it down in a play and show these people...not just them but –

DA: Our people.

NW: Yeah. Don’t make a mockery of somebody else’s sacredness. There are some things that need to be kept sacred. If you don’t know about it, then you weren’t meant to. If you want to find out, do it with respect.

DA: With respect, not a time to be part of it. I think that some type of healing is trying to be done also in the play. I think that they were trying to get through the anger and the anguish of these New-Agers coming here. The different products that they use to exploit Indians. That was another issue that they had, exploitation. That was put into the play.

RL: If someone called you up and said, "I would like you to come over to the tribal community here in Virginia. We’ve got some ideas, we want you to help us make them into a play," what things pop to your mind with that task that you haven’t mentioned, that would be important to do in the set-up?

NW: Right off my head, it would be to break the stereotypes that people have with us as Lakotas. We did this workshop in Minnesota. One man was from Iran. He asked my daughter, he says, "Do you have telephones down there?" She said, "Yeah I do. I have a two-story tee-pee with a satellite and a cell phone." Where’s the feathers? You know?

DA: Just to put it in their face. We don’t wear feathers. We don’t eat buffalo meat.

JK: Not everyday, anyway.

DA: Right. Just at the restaurants.

RL: A friend of mine took a job. She answered an ad in a magazine for a job in New York City. She is from Johnson City, Tennessee. The person was looking for a personal secretary. She was a secretary for someone in the UN. My friend said, "Okay, I’m going to get out of Johnson City. I’m going to go to New York and see what happens." She takes the job and comes and knocks on the door. The person opens the door, looks at her and yells back, "She’s wearing shoes!"

NW: That is like the stereotypes they always have of Indian peoples, that we are always going to talk all dramatic and very philosophically. "You’ll be my friend as long as the grass grows." That we are all standing in the sunset.

DA: – we are all related –

RL: Those ways of breaking down stereotypes, you feel that they are important ways of getting the ground settled so that we are talking real people when we are talking about theater. Anything else?

DA: Maybe getting people from that community to come in and start with input from them. A lot of things here are different from other reservations. Maybe they experience different things, but they have different experiences. I think we had elders in here to reflect, and then younger people. There was a kind of different age group. It helps also I think.

RL: In this workshop you had a big range of age?

DA: Yeah. I was like, 19. And then there were people in their 30s and 40s.

JK: Claudette came by and she would have been middle 60s.

DA: Sometimes it is different for half-breeds, and sometimes it is different for full-bloods. I am definitely a half-breed , and she is definitely a full-blood.

JK: We had non-Indians involved also.

DA: Right. We had non-Indians who live on the reservation. They had different experiences.

NW: I was just thinking of this young white man we met up there at the mall. Me and my cousin were sitting there. We were laughing and that white boy turned around, "Were you talking to me?" "No." He said, "Where are you guys from?" We said, "Rosebud." And he said, "You guys are way over there, huh?" That lip gesture, you know? He grew up here, his parents are from here. It was so funny. That is how he broke the ice. We knew he was a homeboy. The Indian slang words, he was using them and it was just natural for him. I think to work in a different community would take that community’s involvement. Just to sit down at a table and throw up ideas. Break stereotypes. Let them ask these little crazy questions they have in their heads, you know? I would like to ask how come they call you hillbillies? How do they make moonshine? I mean just my stereotypes of that way. I’ve seen the movie "Deliverance," and in my mind, I was never going to go down that way. It would help to learn the community you are going to. Their thoughts, their ideas, the way they grew up, if you have something in common, even if you didn’t.

RL: You would feel like you need to do some prep work before you go into someplace? I am thinking of the Monocan Indian group in the Blue Ridge. LeAnne and Debbie Hicks in WagonBurner have really been helpful to me. They think of themselves as southeast Indians, and that they experience real differences out of their experience of the southeast and the removal to Oklahoma. This puts them in a very different place –

DA: I was going to say that the different way that white people oppressed onto the Indians that are in different areas. there is difference there. The Nez Pierce, or the Trail of Tears – not all tribes are a part of that. So that is what we are looking at too.

RL: If anything else pops to mind, speak up.

JK: Have you had a chance, Nancy, to talk about what you did with your writing after LeAnne had gone?

NW: I always have a head full of ideas and thoughts from my own personal experiences and I thought to write a play you needed to have the structure. I had tried to do that. I realized that the rough draft is what counts. You just start writing from the time I could remember. I tore up the other one and just started writing all of my experiences. And sit back and look at them. For me it was like everybody else went through this, and then to realize that nobody else ever did and the ones that have may have gone on and dealt with it or forgotten about it or put it back in the back of their heads. My story about myself, my life, my upbringing and the people around me was important because it is a part of our history. You hear here about – my mother, the boarding-school days. The abuses. And a lot of people my age and maybe her age have never been through that. As time goes by the education system gets better and better and physical discipline is not used in the schools. For me, I was 40 in June. I was going to public school in the ’60s and ’70s. To have that same abuse done to me and know what my mother and father went through, and to really turn around and look at my children, to stand in front of them, because all of my children are tall for their age, and to have to tell a teacher not to treat my child any different because she is taller than the rest of the class. Don’t you dare hit them or you are going to deal with me. To try and protect them. To write everything down. Sometimes it gets overwhelming, so get up and walk away. Leave it. Come back and not touch it, but write some more that’s coming up. For me, it was a big release. At first I was ashamed to do it. Just dredged up a bunch of things that I didn’t want to remember. But the more I wrote and put down on that paper, I stood up and take account for my life. For the shit they dished out. For the shit I didn’t deserve. You know? And send it back. Give it back to them. This is what you did. You made me focus my life on something that you did. I shouldn’t have wasted a lot of years over that. For me this writing, this work with LeAnne helped me deal with my own issues and leave the person that I’ve always been, that I’ve never been. You go through shit and you don’t know who you are sometimes. And it is like that.

DA: I kind of had the same experience when I went to California. I met this girl out there. She was a writer. She didn’t write a lot, but the way she performed her poetry sparked an interest in me. She was younger than me and she was more aware of herself than I was. She knew who she was, and I was kinda confused. So, I started to look at what she was doing and tried to do the same thing so that I could feel the same way she was. I don’t know. I felt like I was in a whirlwind, and she knew where she was going. Her poetry was making her assert herself. Giving her confidence. I had the same thought. I want my confidence like that. So I took a book and I started writing. I felt the same way when I started writing. I felt a release, or a relief of some of the stuff that I kept inside. I wrote it in a way because I want people to understand what I am writing. I wrote it in phrases and in general things that would spark my memory. It started to develop to where I was more open and wrote actually what I was talking about. It was almost like a healing process where you are trying to let out some of it. The more and more you write, it starts to come out like a faucet. When I would take a look at what I was writing it helped me to want to be the person that I want to be. Express the things I want to express so that I can let go of those things and move on. I felt a lot better after writing. I never thought writing could fill that void of not being able to resolve things. It was like talking to somebody, but they weren’t judging you. You could write down anything you wanted to, you didn’t need to worry about being judged. After awhile, after reading, I wanted to share it with people. Let them hear it and see if they felt the same way. After reading it to my friend who inspired me to write, she was really moved by what I wrote. Again, it struck something in her that wanted to write more. It was like we were bouncing off each other for awhile. She would share something with me and then I would think of an experience that I had had and write it down. It was back and forth. Like with my grandmother’s poetry reading, too, that same effect was with me seeing the different images of nature and how they match the poem. How the words brought the images and the images brought the words together. It made me want to write things about nature and the creation of things. I think that was the same experience I had with that girl. The bouncing off, the creativity that was expressed. I have always known about my grandma’s poetry, but I never really bounced off of it. I never really appreciated her performance until last night. I guess I am older, or have more experience. I am more appreciative towards her, towards her art. Makes me want to be a part of it. That is kind of one of the reasons I started with writing, art and stuff.

RL: Theater, as we might know it in the western culture, is that part of your tradition? Storytelling is, but putting it inside a building and making play actors act out a script?

DA: I think there is a structure maybe. We put up our poles and we have the audience sit out there and we perform during our pow-wows. So, that is like a structured theater.

NW: Plus, in times when there weren’t the forms of mass communication like TV and radio, that is how people visited. That is how people got there point across – by going to visit different personalities performing. A long time ago I remember being in a log house. I would sit in there and listen to them. They would tell the greatest stories and they were really animated. You would get the ones that get up there and really act it out. Like you were saying, storytelling, but animation, too. Indian theater without even knowing it. You’ve got those crazy aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas that sometimes really try and outdo each other’s stories. That is how you pass the time, that is how the elders sit. That is what made you a good relative is if you knew how to visit.

DA: They put on hunting plays too, I guess you could call it. They reenact for the people who made the best kill. They also do dances where women reenact their going into their womanhood. They’re acting out they become a woman. Dancing with these certain objects, being given certain things to become a woman. I think it starts very far back.

JK: That is a viewpoint shift, being trained in western theater, that I made after I got here. At some point, it was also bringing students to the viewpoint shift. It is always interesting to me that people think that Native theater starts somewhere in the ’60s. Really, when you start doing some background reading, or start talking with people, it is there. What is interesting is that the people here are very willing to recognize the theatrical in it. In the ritual, in the ceremony, and the western people are not as willing. That has been an interesting experience for me as well as opening, saying these are things that happen in theater and having people here say, "Well shoot, we’ve been doing that 400 years." That is one of the reasons we’ve been able to make things go here as well as they have.

DA: There were also costumes. We also had the scenery with a fire. The performance art was there. To entertain and keep the tradition going was the main purpose of them. They were also doing theater and not even knowing it.

JK: When we start talking in the classes, people who are here and know those traditions say, "Oh, well yeah. Of course. We were doing theater, we just didn’t call it that." That was a little bit of a struggle at first for me, because I had some students who were very vocal about saying, "This is a foreign thing and I don’t know if I am going to like it. I am just here to check you out for a couple of class meetings." Then making those connections was very important to the program here. It has worked both ways, we have learned a lot from each other.

NW: Even right down to this little guy [her sleeping son], people are so animated when they are telling stories. There is that one key word that they want to get across that is going to make their whole point. He is like that already, even in his little boy way. He comes up and says, "Ain’t I so silly, mom?" And I say, "Yes you are so silly." They start young. That is all they do, even in the womb. Indians believe in life before birth and after death. When they are in the womb that is when they say the woman is very sacred. That is when you start to develop the little spirit, so you treat yourself good and be happy. That is what I have tried to do with all my children.

DA: I hope I am going to get pregnant...

NW: I would put headphones on my stomach with my oldest. I love classical music, piano and all of that. I would put headphones on my stomach, I would be reading...I was going to college at that time. I really credit that to the person she is now. She writes. She has had some of her poems published. She graduated and is here doing her basics. She is going to fly from the nest. She is really vocal, she is funny. I credit my brother and sister, my mother for helping bring up a child in a happy and fun home. There’s ten of us. When we get together for the holidays it is like comedy hour. If somebody is trying to get emotional they all get quiet and you can hear those brains working. Then somebody says something and it breaks that tension, you know. Humor is always good. It is just the natural thing.

RL: Something that I learned yesterday listening to Albert and his mother talking about how he learned the flute – and I am seeing a connection in what you are talking about in terms of what LeAnne brought and released you from how to write. You were talking about no judgment: Albert was given a flute and told go learn it. He wasn’t given a teacher that said, "This is how you are going to play it." That tradition of giving permission to learn is a whole different and extraordinary way.

DA: That is an honor, basically.

RL: And like you say, when you do that, I’m sure Albert played lots of stuff that he didn’t play again on his flute, but he found the tune that he liked and he worked on it. It is like you were saying, you took something, and then when that was gone, you had to go and work and then you start doing...and there is all this stuff that comes out and you find it. You find the piece in it. That is what I am talking about when I talk about finding the skills in what LeAnne is doing and what you are doing. In some ways we do things because they are normal, that is the way we do things. But other people would look at them and go, "That is a brand new way of doing something."

NW: I talk to my children and they say, "Aw jeez, Mom, how come you did it this way?" And I say, "Well, this is the first time I’ve ever done it. I’m learning, too. Look at me. Remember me at this age and trying something new. ’Cause for me learning is an everyday thing. Just because I am older, just because I am your mom doesn’t mean I know everything. You know things I don’t even know how to do. Computers – I am still living along the river. You guys are doing computers." That is how I talk to my children. You learn from the young ones, too. Even though you are older and you are supposed to know better and more. I think that is the great thing about just being alive and being able to meet someone like LeAnne and Jeff. Like Jeff said "Drop it on paper. Don’t think about structure, just write."

DA: Having the support. To say this isn’t wrong, and do what you feel. It works. I think if we had structure it would be a little bit harder. It was just like, give me what you’ve got and we’ll put it together and see what we get.

NW: Just all improv. You know? I had taken a theater course here a long time ago and this guy gave me these books talking about Stanislavsky's theory of believability. That was good, kind of gave me something to focus on, but it was something different than this. It was more of a book learning. This was just people working together.

DA: Experiences.

NW: Just sitting there laughing and joking. Sometimes getting real serious. You just got to be yourself. What came out on that paper, when you read it over – I took it home and read it, sitting there laughing and imagining getting up in front of an audience and doing it. At first I thought of making an excuse, "Awww. One of my kids is sick." But then again, I said no. That other side says, "Oh come on, it is going to be fun." I went to Minnesota at the beginning of the month. I always like to challenge myself because everything is always a challenge. For example, my marriage, it is totally nonexistent. I knew it was going to bottom out. It was going to be something scary, something brand new for me. So, I rode this ride called the Megadrop.

DA: I rode that before.

NW: About 12 stories. You sit on these chairs, your feet are dangling and it goes up. I would watch and it would hang there for 15 seconds and just drop.

DA: Quickly.

NW: For me it was a challenge to myself. If I can get on that at 40 years old, when my life feels like it is unraveling, get on there and drop. Well, it went up. It went up faster than I thought, and when it got up there I thought, "Oh shit I’ve got five seconds."

DA: Can’t change your mind.

RL: Can you bail out?

NW: No. You are up in the sky. And I didn’t want it to drop. I thought, no, no, no. And then I heard that click. I counted to five and that was it. whooooooooooshhhhhh.

DA: That is life, too.

NW: Yeah. That is how I looked at it. When I come home that is how the bottom of my life is going to drop out, to say, well I survived that drop. It was sickening. It was fast, it was sickening, I had no control over it. And then to come back here with that experience and everything does drop out. Hmm. How come I am not crying? How come I am handling it a lot better than I thought I would.

DA: Gaining confidence.

NW: When my feet touched the ground after riding that ride I felt like a peppermint patty, you know? It was like a pull all the way down inside. Whoa. So, I went and tried a couple of more rides. I’m scared of heights. That is how I was able to take care of a lot of stuff without someone telling me, you need to go to codependency. "You are an abused woman, you need to go to codependency to try and understand why this person is doing what he is doing and why you are feeling what you are feeling." Not everybody needs that. People, for me, this person just needed to write something down. Take all these thoughts and put them down on paper. Not touch it, not revise it. Get up walk away from it, do it again and then go back maybe in a few days and read and say, "Oh God, you are pitiful." Writing this kind of theater for me was damn good therapy. I think I am funny. I can’t help that. I’ve got this mother and father the same way, and all these brothers and sisters. To have someone like LeAnne say, "That is great! I never heard that before!" It was great. It made you feel like you did matter. You know? If you know what the life on the rez is like, even though you struggle real hard to keep the bad things out of your life, this is the rez. It swamps you like a big wave. It just takes you and you have to crawl out again.

DA: The way of life here surrounds around alcoholism, or using, or someone is jealous of your happiness. People want to bring you down here. They are jealous because their life isn’t as they wanted and they want to see you with them. It is hard to come up here because there are a lot of people that look at your life and are jealous.

NW: Misery loves company.

DA: Yeah. And it is hard. You keep breaking free of that, but you always get dragged back. I didn’t want to come back here because I was pregnant and I knew that if I stayed here I would never get out of here. Now I am stuck here. I met this man and he has helped me to see that there is life. I can live off the rez, I could leave here. I went to Minnesota also, for some schooling and I was planning on doing that for ten months, but finding out I was pregnant, I had to leave. That experience that I had up there was really wonderful. I met a lady who helped me take a look at myself and take a look at the kind of life that I can have. I can be happy. I can be positive and live a sober life. Even if I came back to the reservation I can do it. All I have to do is take it day by day and let go of the people that bring hurt towards you.

NW: Here on the rez they always have a lot of statistics. Alcoholism, drugs, pregnancy, everything. For me, like she is saying, to be here and be overwhelmed by someone else’s misery – they don’t like you happy so they are going to bring you down as much as they can. You find other ways to bring yourself back up. You have to, otherwise you’ll be cruising around on a Friday afternoon in the middle of the day getting drunk.

DA: Or at eight o'clock in the morning, still drunk from before.

NW: For me, being married for 13 years and to have that end because of a spouse’s alcoholism and have five kids, two mangy dogs and a parrot that won’t shut up, it is like, omigod. Sometimes there are good days, and you’ve got bad days. You wake up sometimes and you are overwhelmed. And you think, I could do this. On this place, if you look at your life as a waste, then that is how your future is going to be, too.

DA: You have to want to rise above it. I think that is what I am trying to do. Going to school, just trying to better myself. Expressing my feelings more than I did. Telling people that I feel hurt when they do this so that they know, and so that I’ve gotten my feelings out and I am not holding them in. I used to be one of those people where I was out in the afternoon drinking. Then I got pregnant and it helped me realize that I have to be a responsible person now. I have to be a mother. I have to be caring to another person. I’m not even doing that with myself, so I need to take a look at myself and say, "You need to change. There is something that is not right." This place doesn’t help. All they do is tell you what is wrong with you, or what you are doing wrong. They make you feel that no matter what you do, know matter how fast you are running you are staying in this same spot. You are in this rut.

NW: That is like what Rosebud is doing in this play.

DA: She is trying to get out of this rut, in her people.

NW: And being bombarded by everything that the well-meaning people mean for her, but they have no idea who in the hell you are. They think by coming in and telling you that Jehovah is the best way for you – they don’t even stop to think that you already have your own creation story. Everybody has got a higher power. And that is something that I really enjoyed about the play. The more we talk here, that is everything that Rosebud is going through. Religion, alcoholism, the taking of the land...a full front of genocide in all directions. That is what I’ve been doing myself. Sitting down and writing. I’m 40 years old, five kids, no car, no job. When I finished this class, I worked at a shelter. I was the outreach advocate. I am a vocal person, even if I feel trashy. To reach out and touch and help somebody else, this is why I started at the shelter, too, for these women. A lot of times when you are going through some grief, people talk. People talk and talk. They entrust these words to you, these feelings to you. They are trusting you. I gave them some pen and paper. I told them to sit down and write. Just keep on writing for the rest of your life. In this way, you are leaving a legacy for the children. They may read it one day and know that Mommy was a human. Mommy had feelings. Mommy was a woman in love one of these times. It is a legacy. Write your dreams down. Everything you ever want. Who knows? One day you could give it to somebody or work with somebody else to put it in a play. Somebody else in your family is going to see and understand. The rate of violence is epidemic here. It is phenomenal, but a lot of people don’t see it. If you go up on this hill and you look here, this is just a four-mile strip of houses, seven churches, two big grocery stores, a lot of gas stations, a bank. There are four ways in and out. Right smack dab in the middle of our homeland, but some people say out in the boonies. Way out in the middle of nowhere. In fact we are sitting on the biggest aquifer in the United States...wasn’t it, second biggest aquifer in the United States? They thought they were putting us on this barren land, but we got a lot of mineral rights here. So, this is a way to help a lot of people. The women that I helped during my time over there, when I see them they are still writing. It is just a matter of being vocal, putting it on paper.

RL: My wife works with a women’s resource center. She works with children that have been sexually abused. Basically she works in the school system. I can imagine, through my experience with her, I can imagine what you are doing.

NW: I went through that in school, with a teacher, the older relative. They didn’t have the prevention that they do now. So, I grew up with that constantly, constantly. One day I drove passed this counseling center. I drove passed four times on my trip, each time meaning to pull in and each time not. When I did, it was the greatest thing I ever did for myself. As a father, my father was an ordained priest, come from a big family like that, pipe-carriers, priests. To take a good look at myself and say, "This ain’t shit I need to hold. I didn’t ask for it. I’m going to deal with it." Get a big ugly monkey off your back after 30 years and just feel like, okay, now what? Forty years old and feeling like my life is just started. I used to ask my mother, how does it feel to be old. She was 72. She would say, "Come here, look in my eyes. In here I am 21. But this body is old. It is breaking down. It is dying around me. I want to run. I want to go chop that wood out there, but my legs don’t work. My eyesight is going. That is what it feels like." That is what it feels like for me. Forty-year-old body, but inside I am 29. I am still a young person. These are things that Jeff told me to write down because somebody out there is going to benefit from what you went through. That makes you feel like your life isn’t a lost cause, that your life isn’t going to come to a miserable meaningless end. You leave something behind...

RL: I also find that if I write it down, I don’t have to carry it in me as much. I am open for more. I find that both things happen. It is sharing and it is also getting rid of it. I never knew that about putting it out there. I am always tinkering with my writing. But to just put it out there is good.

NW: This play, this writing class, this art institute holds a lot for a lot of people. There should be more funding for it. There should be more time for it. Especially for these little guys. These are the biggest hams you are ever going to know. Keep them that way.

RL: Well I don’t think it is going to be an easy road by any means, but part of our work is going to be to document this work so that others can know about it. The advantage of the computer age is that people can share what is local at the national level. It used to have to take a TV crew and a big CBS broadcast for the nation to know something. We have more control over what the nation knows now. What we are trying to do is to document what people are doing and what people are doing well and make sure that enters into the national dialogue about what art is, what is fundable, what is appropriate, and so on. The standards have been exclusionary. In some ways you can see how it would be. The standards that create what gets funded and what doesn’t are about what people think is important. The people that have the money, and what they think is important. There are more tools now to shape that understanding. And like I say, it isn’t something that is going to happen like [snap], it is a huge task. It is also about ownership of resources. People that have the money want the money. That is part of what we are doing. An awareness that in some ways the practice of grassroots, community-based art making is way ahead of any kind of national awareness, and any kind of national dialogue about art in the community.

NW: Art in community is good. It helps open up other people’s minds to the things that happen here. I know a lot of people don’t understand the struggle that goes on here everyday even to get a loaf of bread. You can have a job, but the prices here on this reservation are so high. A paycheck doesn’t go far. For all of us living is a daily struggle. To get lights paid, to get food is a daily struggle. The people that don’t have that struggle, they have everything I would want. I wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did. If they had to live the life that we live now, they would probably say, "How do you do it?" To hear kids crying and saying they are hungry, but all you have is cereal, so you put water in it. To me this place here really opens a lot for a lot of people. It would help a lot of people understand. We’ve got poor people all over. My dad always used to say, "The best you can learn from is to hear the prayers of the poor." They pray for things that people that have don’t. They don’t say, "God, please give me some money." Most poor people say, "God, please help me get through this day." What is a rich person going to say, "Thank you for all the blessings you give me, now give me some more"?

RL: It struck me when we were talking earlier about the people coming in and taking children –

NW: You guys never heard of that?

RL: I’ve heard of it. I’ve not had anyone say it to me straight in this way, but I’ve read about it.

NW: How I remember that is my father being a priest up there in the Cannonball reservation. All these parents came to my house crying. They were crying. They came home one day, and for every house you could see some of these young people running and being chased down to be loaded forcefully onto those buses. The parents coming and feeling like, you know, just crying. My mother telling me to go outside.

My sister went to Africa. She met some elderly women, some Masai people, way out in the bush. The African-Americans that she went with did not want to sleep in those huts, did not want to sleep on the ground. There were no showers. They wanted to go back to their hotels in Kenya. My sister stayed out there with them. She contracted malaria, but she enjoyed it. The elders told her that they looked at the American Indian as living inside the belly of the beast and still being alive. We are a lot stronger than they realized. From a lot of pain, you only get stronger unless it overwhelms you and you kill yourself. That is really big here. My sister, the other day did that. She is going to be 50 this year, so overwhelmed by being here that she tried to kill herself. It is a daily thing in people’s lives. They say, "Oh I heard your sister tried to kill herself." That is just a common thing. A lot of that goes on even now. All these churches will just battle over your kids. They will try and bring the funniest things in there to get you to send your kids there. My little guys, we all cut our hair two years ago when my mother died, their grandmother died. Now I am trying to grow it out because my elders said, "Let it go. Let her go. She is always around." Those mornings, everything on that day, or the time when they came to our school and loaded us up on the buses. They took us to Fort Yates to the dental office and filled each one of our teeth because they got so many dollars per tooth for putting in that silver stuff. All my teeth are filled. They did all of your teeth in one day. I remember going home, after that novocaine wore off my head hurt. My mom said, "What happened?" They didn’t even know. They didn’t ask permission. They got so many dollars per tooth to drill and fill. To go home and have all that pain and then see your parents get pissed. We were just mindless little things then.

There are a lot of things that these people, when they sat and did this play – it comes from a lot of painful experiences.

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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