Interview Summaries

By Linda Frye Burnham

All interviews were by Robert H. Leonard. They took place between April and September 2001 in the District of Columbia, Ohio, New York and South Dakota. All have been edited for length by CAN. The full, unedited transcripts are available on request.

Interview with Justin Data, company member

Justin Data works in Web publishing for Paine Webber in New York City. He joined WagonBurner while he was a graduate student in journalism at the University of Iowa and met LeAnne Howe through his work-study job with the Office of International Education. Data describes himself as "half Jewish and half Native American" who "didn’t know any Indian people" growing up. He observes that the reason WagonBurner came together and stayed together in Iowa was that "we all needed each other very badly. It is one of those moments in the universe when things kind of come together. There wasn’t a big community, in fact there was a lack of one. I think that is why we grasp at it, work at it, fit into it so hard. We needed that in our lives, every one of us. For some reason each of us were displaced. In the middle of the country, in the pinnacle of nondiversity, conservatism. In that lack of community, we kind of created our own, which is why I think we consider ourselves a community theater."

In the interview, Data often describes WagonBurner as "the play," rather than a theater. He talks about their creative process in great detail, noting that it is one of consensus, though LeAnne Howe had final authority over crucial decisions. He catches the satiric, edgy feeling of the early days of the theater in this description: "We would run around and tell stupid jokes, make wisecracks, auction off Indians for slavery. We were trying to be funny that way, but I think mostly there were people that looked kind of scared after each show, or confused." He claims they used "using Indian-style humor to make people realize, partially, the truth behind Indian history, break stereotypes. But also, I think, making them laugh at the script, everything that was being said, and all the serious things that were being conveyed, making them laugh at it made it less heavy and more tolerable to accept, digest and think about. If you went out there and it wasn’t this bizarre, off the cuff, satirical humor, you would just sit there and feel incredibly depressed. You might even leave."

Data preferred the early, "bare-bones" days of "the play," before it acquired more theatrical trappings for its run at the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American India in New York City. His favorite playdate was a performance in Ames, Iowa, before a rare Native audience: "That is what we were looking for. That is the moment when we really found it. I think it was better when it was in a more amateur-type environment. When you are making your living by other ways, you kind of have the freedom to do only what is extremely important to you artistically. There are real voices coming out of that." For creative development, Data says, a nurturing environment is necessary. "It is almost like a support group. Like anything else, as long as you have an environment where everyone is going to help you out and nurture your ideas and not cut you down, I think you are going to have some kind of success, even if it is just for your own personal growth. Then you can work on making others grow."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Justin Data, click here

Interview with Debbie Hicks, company member

Hicks is Creek and a member of WagonBurner since 1991; she met LeAnne Howe when both were living in the area of Iowa City, Iowa, all connected in some way with the University of Iowa. Hicks was drafted to play the Bingo Lady in "Indian Radio Days," and took the walk-on part of the "pragmatic elder" and made it her own. She resides in Washington. D.C., where she teaches African-American teens in the city’s school district. Hicks identifies as a storyteller and "the only openly gay person of the group."

Hicks describes her own history as an Indian "born into the last generation of legal segregation in a college town" who began to make contact with, then live with traditional and Indian "folk-culture" communities in Alabama and eastern Oklahoma. She speaks about the influence of southern Indian culture and differentiates it from the Native people she met in Iowa, "primarily western peoples or northern peoples, who didn’t always interact harmoniously." The WagonBurner company, she says, set out to "create our own niche" and share their "sense of what it meant to be Indian." Hicks presents lengthy analyses of Native history, character and issues.

According to Hicks, the company "saw ourselves as an educational troupe. A classroom brought to the stage." Carrying out this mission both inside and outside their far-flung Native community, they have often used humor to raise questions, test boundaries and "invoke some honest conversation between the cast and the audience." WagonBurner's work confronted such issues as "dealing with the dominant culture," the "racial creation" of Native American stereotypes, the hidden histories of Native peoples, sexuality and gender, subjects taboo in Native culture, "New Age commercialization" of Native spirituality and the inherent problems in using satire to communicate cross-culturally. Hicks talks about the company’s performance style as containing "spontaneous adaptations during a performance" and a self-critique that included "hands-on-hips discussions afterwards" and "when necessary, arbitration by LeAnne." She is positive that WagonBurner will return to performing together, on "Indian time," meaning in their own time.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Debbie Hicks, click here

Interview with LeAnne Howe, artistic director

Howe’s interview is largely a comparison between the way "white people" think about the arts, organizational structure and artist-audience interaction and the way Native people do. For instance, she points out that though the late 1990s created economic hardships for many artists, for Indians, times have always been hard. The apparently flexible economic structure of WagonBurner – working when and as the times allow – might be a model of sustainability for all artists, she says, and all theater is sustained by "that same belief that things are fluid." Over the years, she guesses, 22 people have become a part of WagonBurner and new members continue to join as she travels, teaching and directing.

Howe discusses a WagonBurner work in progress, also cited by others interviewed. "Shaman of OK" is a parody of the work of L. Frank Baum, a South Dakota favorite son who wrote "The Wizard of Oz" and whose "hatred" of Indians is well documented. Her analysis and description of the thinking around this project is a good example of the political humor of all WagonBurner projects, in which her mission is "to teach about the absurdities of the things that have happened to us … it has to have that for me or it is not worth doing. … I am really trying to teach people what a horrific event the Trail of Tears was with humor." Howe describes the dangerous climate around such a proposal, recalling the white student protest at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion, campus when students there presented WagonBurner’s "Indian Radio Days." She also describes racial incidents following her hiring, along with two other women of color, at a college in Minnesota.

Such experiences, combined with some white audiences’ misunderstanding of WagonBurner’s use of humor, has led her to decide "people don’t know anything about Indians. Not anything. They don’t have any frame of reference. They don’t know what the Trail of Tears was. They can’t laugh because they don’t have any frame of reference." Lately, she says, "I’ve come 180 degrees" in terms of who her audience is. "I used to think I was trying to educate the mainstream at large, but now I don’t think I can do that. That is probably not going to happen. Now I think Indian people are my audience."

Howe describes her teaching and directing method, which is always collective, believing she is there not to teach but to help, to "encourage people to write their own plays, show them how it is done, and mount a production." Howe describes "Rosebud," a play her class at Sinte Gleska University wrote, based on Orson Welles’ "Citizen Kane" and the theft of India land. She prefers interactive theater: "I like breaking that wall. I like coming out into the audience. That way they come away with a sense of participation in the group." She believes involvement of everyone, the tellers and the audience, "is what Indian theater is about," and gives many examples of collectivity in Indian culture. She also describes the Indian artist as trickster and adds this perspective to WagonBurner’s use of humor in theater. She adds vivid examples of her use of theater in teaching "across the disciplines. How better to teach history than to turn those moments into theater and have them perform it. Then they get it, as opposed to just having it as text. That, to me, is the essence of learning. That is the same approach as innovative theater. I don’t want to do anyone else’s scripts, necessarily; I would rather see students write their own."

To read the entire (edited) interview with LeAnne Howe, click here

Interview with LeAnne Howe; Jim Wilson, guest actor; and Liz Hopkins, Rosebud residency participant

Hopkins met LeAnne Howe when Howe came to Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota to teach a creative-writing class for Project HOOP. Hopkins describes in great detail "Lakota Lullaby," a play written by the class about Christopher Columbus and his involvement with slavery. The action of the play is a discussion of this topic by a group of Native women who are cooking while their husbands watch football on TV in another room. Their talking brings about a change in a young schoolboy who was not taught this version of Columbus history in school. Hopkins calls this kind of discussion a typical Native American way of dealing with problems: "There is a lot of therapy in Native American ‘talking circles,’ they used to call them."

Hopkins describes another play she wrote by herself, inspired by white abuse of Native fishing rights in Wisconsin, and her own personal experiences of life on the reservation and with Catholic missionaries. She creates a world in which "everything is turned around. The Indian people are the ones in charge, in control." White people are not allowed to speak English or practice their own religion. "What I wanted to show was that if it had happened to you, you wouldn’t like it," she says. "It is not anger, but I want them to have a different thought."

The three interviewees add more thoughts on Indian humor, the timing of WagonBurner’s working together, the benefits of their work for Indian audiences and details of the student performance of "Indian Radio Days" at the University of S.D. They also discuss the possibilities and drawbacks of donating their archives to a university in Ohio.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Howe, Wilson and Hopkins, click here

Interview with Dee Antoine, Rosebud residency participant, and Jeff Kellogg, director of theater for the Sinte Gleska University Art Institute

Kellogg provides details on the Art Institute at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Reservation, where he is director of theater, and on Project HOOP, a project of UCLA and the Kellogg Foundation, in collaboration with the Sicangu Writing Project, the South Dakota site for the National Writing Project. This collaboration brought LeAnne Howe to Sinte Gleska to do a writing project with the students, producing the plays mentioned above, "Lakota Lullaby" and "Rosebud." He describes how he heard about and contacted LeAnne Howe.

Dee Antoine was a local participant in the writing project, having been involved in local theater events for the past three years. Robert Leonard explains the research project in detail and gives his response to a community performance event he witnessed at Rosebud the night before. Dee Antoine discusses her grandmother’s slide show at the event and says her grandmother was disappointed because the slides were "out of order," but that she herself appreciated the order they were in: "It was like it was meant to be that way." This leads her to make the kind of observation common in these interviews about the way Indians do things: "That is kind of how a lot of things go for us I think. We don’t plan it and then it happens." Leonard observed difference in the Native audience, "In this environment the audience and the performance are linked in a way that is unusual, and for my money more valuable. It isn’t a consumer/provider relationship."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Antoine and Kellogg, click here

Interview with Nancy Whitehorse, Rosebud residency participant, and Dee Antoine and Jeff Kellogg.

In this long interview, the Rosebud residency participants reiterate their appreciation for LeAnne Howe’s guidance in creating their plays, especially her style of initial inclusion of each of the participants’ ideas without judgment. "It was fun," says Nancy Whitehorse, "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." They describe in detail the evolution of the play "Rosebud," after seeing "Citizen Kane" in class, when Howe pointed to Kane’s dying word "Rosebud" as a "spark" to start a play from. Additional material came from stories about the Hearst family’s ownership of the Homestake Mine ("the largest gold mine in the world at the time") in the South Dakota Black Hills, once Indian country. Personal material from the lives of the students became part of the collaboration, with special emphasis on experience with religious missionaries who took Indians away in buses to church or to schools in Utah. These experiences, they say, robbed the people of their own "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." They talk about plans for expansion and revision of "Rosebud" for upcoming conferences. Whitehorse and Antoine relate other Native issues surfacing in the creative process: the quality of healthcare on the reservation, police harassment, local Indians who are selling sun dances for cash.

Kellogg details the classes he teaches at Sinte Gleska about the history of Indian culture and theater, and how they lead to creation of community plays. He describes publicity methods that work in the area for performances: fax, radio, e-mail. He mentions concern about carrying the play to other communities where "they may not get it because they haven’t been around here. But that isn’t a reason not to engage with those audiences, either." Says Antoine: "They have to understand the difference. Where we live and where they live." Whitehorse talks about the positive local reception for the play, especially among her older relatives, who told her, "That was great. It was funny. I liked this part about it because that is what I remember." Says Whitehorse: "They really liked the humor in all of it because it kind of detracts from the painful memories. Laughter is the best medicine." Leonard asks them how they would approach being brought into another community to help with a play. By "getting people from that community to come in and start with input from them, " says Antoine, including young people and elders, as well as "non-Indians." They would "sit down at a table and throw up ideas. Break stereotypes. Let them ask these little crazy questions they have in their heads," says Whitehorse.

Kellogg asks the women to talk about "what you did with your writing after LeAnne had gone." Whitehorse says the experience gave her permission to write all her life experiences, "my story about myself, my life, my upbringing and the people around me was important because it is a part of our history. 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 took account for my life." Antoine concurs: "It was almost like a healing process. I never thought writing could fill that void of not being able to resolve things. 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." They discuss the presence of theater and performance in their everyday lives as Indians, particularly growing up: storytelling, ritual, ceremony. Kellogg relates the "viewpoint shift" he went through about this as a teacher, and what he learned.

Finally, the women describe in detail their personal struggles to survive and find hope in life on the reservation. They talk about peer pressure, jealousy, substance abuse, depression, poverty and suicide – and the therapeutic effects of using them as materials in their creative work. "These are things that Jeff told me to write down because somebody out there is going to benefit from what you went through," says Whitehorse. "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."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Whitehorse, Antoine and Kellogg, click here

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