 And indeed, my understanding of why relationships get has already changed. Survival of theatre as an art form depends on that. There's room for it all! Well, thank you everybody for coming here to the Segal Theatre Centre here at the Graduate Centre CUNY. And we welcome, tonight, from Canada, Jean-François Coté, who is with us, a sociologist who feels very strongly for very, very good reasons we think that this is a field we all should know more about. First of all, of course, we should know more about our Canadian neighbours. It's stunning that there's so little exchange in the theatre world. And of course, we should all know more about native or Indigenous theatre here in the US, but also in Canada. But I think this is the one beginning of a dialogue, and hopefully this will also show in this evening. Jean-François will talk about half an hour about his book and his research, which he is interested in besides his normal work. And we welcome tonight, again, the great Spider-Woman Theatre with us here. We have Muriel, Miguel here, and Gloria Miguel. So thank you for coming. That is a great honour to have you here. Actually, it happens that Jean-François wrote about three Canadian theatre artists, the Ondinoque ensemble, Drew Haydn, Taylor, but also about Monique Mojica, and she happens to be Gloria's daughter. So there's a very close relation. And already in the dressing room we came clear that there's lots to talk about, about what is what. And so thank you for coming. My name is Frank Henschka. I'm the director of programmes here at the Siegel Theatre, and we bridge academia and professional theatre, international and American theatre. And we have had a couple of events on Indigenous theatre. We should have many, many more, but it's a very significant, important theme, and this is our contribution to it. It's an ongoing dialogue, and thank you all really for coming, taking time out of your lives to be with us tonight. So, again, we will have your talk. Then we have a discussion here, and then we have it as an open forum, and we all can make suggestions, questions or remarks. So again, thank you for coming, and Jean-François. Thank you. Okay, and I don't know if I have the PowerPoint. I'm kind of a low-tech guy, but I have a small PowerPoint presentation, and I don't know if it shows. It might help at some point to see some references and images that I have there. So... Oh, there's Mike. Technical... Yeah, should be good now. Okay, this is it. I've got just a couple of slides. So it's a real pleasure and even an honour for me to be here to present my book, La Renaissance du Théâtre d'Octane, that I published last fall. Very nice to be here at the Siegel Theatre Center in New York City, Manhattan. A warm thank to Frank Hanchken for the invitation, and it's also a treat to share the discussion to follow with Marie-Elle Miguel and Gloria Miguel from Spider Woman Theatre. It's always a true honour to meet persons that you read or read about, and to meet them in person, I mean. So, we're here in Manhattan, Manahata, a native or Indian Lepani name for Land of Many Hills. It stands for Land of Many Hills. We can only imagine what theatre was like back then when this place was called Manahata. There was indeed theatre back then, as I learned when I... when leafing through the Jesuits' relations, reading about this quite elaborate play in three acts performed by the native tribes gathered on the shore of Lake Huron in September of 1641. Theatre that mixed with rituals. The description is very interesting. About 2,000 people gathered at the end of the summer, 1641, on the shore of Lake Huron. And there was this play, a ballet, as Father Lalman who wrote the description called it because it was called back then, the Court Ballet, so that's the way you sort of portrayed it. We don't know much, unfortunately, about these pre-Columbian theatrical traditions. Those native theatrical traditions have been forgotten. That is to say forbidden, fought and repressed for well over 500 years. So it makes sense that... or it's appropriate today to talk about a Renaissance, the title of my book. Renaissance just like the Renaissance in Europe. When the rediscovery of Greek philosophy and mythology and theatre was brought back to our attention after it had been forgotten for well over 1,000 years during the spreading of Christianity. I have to think about our point too, right? So, and Christianity was, in a way, a culture so often hostile to theatre, as we know. But the Renaissance, first in Italy and then in Europe, was not only a rediscovery, it was also a reinvention, fueled as much by the rediscovery of Greek tradition, transmitted and translated by Arabic culture, as by the meddling with Latin or Roman culture and medieval cultures. That is to say the plurality of the local and vernacular cultures that would eventually become Italian, French, English, German, etc. And the Greek, Latin, Arabic and vernacular languages of the different communities made it so from the 12th century on. Paradoxically, and for all its openness to the cultural diversity that made possible the European Renaissance, when it came to the New World, however, this same European Renaissance became synonymous with something that was, under all appearances at least, mostly hermetically closed to pre-Columbian cultures. European Renaissance in the New World resonated indeed, as we all know, more with the death of pre-Columbian cultures. But this seems to be the point of the Renaissance of native cultures that we are witnessing today. It seems most appropriate to call it a Renaissance in that it involves not only the rediscovery of long forgotten and repressed cultural traits and traditions, but also the moment when this involves a very interesting mixing of cultural forms. The argument developed in my book, this book there, stands on this and is twofold. On the one hand, native theater in its Renaissance and reinvention has integrated in a most innovative manner avant-garde theater of the 20th century. Second, and in doing so, native theater has produced a very interesting cultural mix, or rather, as I say, a transcultural form of expression. In the book, I analyzed in three different chapters the work of Ondinak, a Montreal-based native theater group, Monique Mojica, a Canadian playwright, director and actress based in Toronto for the last 35 years or so, but born in the US, I'll say more about this later, and Drew Hayden-Taylor, an Ojibwe playwright born in Ontario, more specifically on the reserve of Curve Lake First Nation near Peterborough. In the book, I draw parallels between these three theatrical experiences and the work of avant-garde theater of Antoinette Arthaud, Gertrude Stein, and Bertle Brecht. More exactly, I establish the active relation between Ondinak and Antoinette Arthaud, Monique Mojica and Gertrude Stein, and Drew Hayden-Taylor and Bertle Brecht. All in all, my analysis proposes that it is through such encounters that a transcultural exchange and expression is made possible. In this exchange, native theater is reaching avant-garde theatrical inventions in the renewal of its own traditional forms, and in return, native theater produces a transformation of the contemporary stage of theatrical productions and repertoire by enlarging and deepening the latter's avant-garde cultural references. How do they do that? It all started in the 1980s, at least in Canada, I should say, or perhaps a little before that, say in the 1960s, with native political activism, and in the 1970s with spider-woman theater and other pioneering theatrical experiences. Ondinak was founded on its side in Montreal in 1985, and in Toronto, the Native Art Performance Arts Center opened in 1982, Monique Mojica becoming its artistic director from 1983 to 86, and Drew Hayden-Taylor becoming author in Residence in 1988-1989. From then on, each of these figures of native theater began producing plays and offering a quite different perspective on native theatrical possibilities. We'll delve briefly but with more details into Ondinak's production and Monique Mojica plays today. I'm not going to have time to talk about Drew Hayden-Taylor. Before I do that, let me just add that my interest for native theater grew out of an interest for the Americas in general as a sociologist. And the way that the cultures of the Americas have evolved over the last four, five hundred years or so, most of the times ignoring the presence, life, and culture of native people. What we are witnessing today is then something radically opposed to that, first and foremost because the native cultural expression is now being put at the forefront of the cultural transformations that are reaching our societies. And it's funny because when I arrived here on Friday, I was at this bookstore on a theater on 42nd Street, I believe, and I bought the latest issue of American theater and there's three articles there. It's called Native Theater Rising. There's three articles focusing on native theater in there. So I thought it was a nice coincidence. I'm going to provide examples of this in Canada, but my examples could have been taken in the U.S., in Mexico, in Colombia, in Brazil, in Peru, et cetera, where native theatrical expression is taking the stage and has been for a couple of decades renewing the theatrical scene by transforming its own expression of our world. So I start with Ondinak. As was said, Ondinak was founded in 1985 by Yves C. Wydurand and Catherine Jean-Cas and the late Jean Blondin. Ondinak is a urine-wendat name that can be translated as the secret longing of the soul for healing. And this gives Ondinak its motto and motivation, searching for the way to cure the soul that has been hurt and traumatized by colonization. Each production that Ondinak presented over the last 33 years has dealt with this idea, sorry, to bring internal suffering to the surface on the stage so it can be faced up front. And in so doing, healing can begin since the traumatized soul is no longer repressed, ignored, or travestized. Theater here is about the possibility of healing and curing the soul and even reaching catharsis. That is to say, the purging of the bad affects. Since those negative affects that are hurting the soul are produced by the relation between native cultures and settler's cultures, the cathartic effect should change this relation into something else. Ondinak has a quite unique character. Along the productions that they've put on stage, they literally embody native culture. If you visit their website, it's a very informative website. So it has a unique character. Along the productions that they've put on stage, they literally embody native cultures of all the Americas, from north to south, east to west, and from pre-Columbian times to the present. Their first production, Le Porteur des Pennes du Monde, translated as Sunraiser, was put on stage in 1985 at the Festival de Théâtre des Amériques in downtown Montreal, precisely where now stands the Place des Festivales at the corner of St. Catherine and Jean-Mont Street. This open-air production portrayed the struggle of a native man to reconcur his land and self-identity in the face of a white man's thirst for profit and greed. Heavily anchored in traditional elements of rituals like dances, drum beats, visions, and prayers to animal spirits. Le Porteur des Pennes du Monde was the first revelation of those possibilities of reviving a native theater in Montreal and as the first installment of this journey of the native soul towards its own regeneration. Entenac followed with two productions, Onon Haran-Wai'u, or the Renversement de la Cervelle, in 1986, and Atis Kenon de Haté, which can be translated as traveling in the country of the dead, in 1988, where those traditional elements were again mixed with contemporary theatrical prepositions that went straight into the problems faced by native cultures in their historical settings, mostly in the Huron-Wendat traditions of the Quebec Provincial Territory. Entenac then produced a major play in 1991. I don't have specific photographs of the play, unfortunately, but they used, of course, this Aztec symbolization. So in 1991, La Conquête de Mexico, the Conquest of Mexico, where it tackled the cataclysmic event of the overturning of the Aztec empire by Cortes in the early 16th century. Planned as a reflection on the coming commemoration of the 500 years of the discovery of the America, La Conquête de Mexico became a turning point for the company, opening its productions to a real hemispheric dimension. It is not, in my view, a mere coincidence that Antonin Artaud, on his side, had considered producing, as is the first show of his Theatres de la Cruaute, Theatre of Cruelty, his own version of this historic moment in a play that he called La Conquête du Mexique, the Conquest of Mexico, but not the city, but the country. That was in 1936. In a quite similar fashion to Antonin Artaud's production, as Artaud's script and notes show. Of course, he never produced the show, and that was before he went to Mexico for traveling in 1936 and 1937. Artaud's interests for Mexico and pre-Columbian cultures are well known, even though they have been buried in the memory of his nine years of internment in various asylums in France. The curing of the soul, in his case, took this unhappy twist, while his conceptions of theatre became more and more radicalized, and were always more a question of experimenting with the flesh and nerves of the body. On did not, meanwhile, pursue their own experimentations and, for a while, directly with native communities on the Atikameg Reservation of Manawan, north of Trois-Rivières, right in the center of the province of Quebec. In a cycle of three plays, Opito Wap in 1995, Sakipichikan in 1996, and Manotako Sawin in 1997, they explored the excruciating pains that tear apart a community totally alienated from itself due to the conditions of life on the reserve. The traumas that are torturing the soul, be they related to alcohol, sexual abuses, violence of all kinds, are inscribed in the bodies, and the only way to get some possible healing is by exposing, through the body, in action on stage, those things that produce the hurting conditions. The scarring might occur when the problems of the community are relived in their theatrical transposition, and if scarring and healing take time, they have to start somewhere. On did not then went on a singular production in 2010. Skipping over many productions, of course, because of the time constraint. Yves Syoudurin and Catherine Jean Ca, after traveling to Guatemala, brought back on stage in Montreal the Rabinah-Lachi, which is the only pre-Columbian play known to have survived the conquest. Indeed, this play comes from the Mayan culture, and is thought to belong to the court theater of the post-classical Mayan period of the 15th century. Based on the rivalry of two protagonists that represents the opposition between the two villages of Rabinah and Kitche in northwest Guatemala, the play is still produced today in its original setting, and traditional representational form. In Andinox's version, though, it became totally transfigured and turned into, I'd say, a highly modernist event that shook the audience with its audacity. Mixing some of the original actors from Guatemala with actors from Mexico and from Quebec, and including women who are only marginal characters in the original play, in the interpretation of central characters, the Xajostun Rabinah-Lachi became a quite extraordinary way of expressing the transcultural aspect of Andinox's theatrical production. Well, you see the two main characters there. These are the two actors from Guatemala, and it's a family who owns the rights of the play there, and the way that they pass from generation to generation, they were invited to do it in Montreal, part of these two actors were invited to do it in Montreal, and then that's the kind of remix of the play that happened there. The numerous other productions that Andinox have come up to in the last few years still continue this transcultural effort at forming and transforming the repertoire of native theater, and enlarging and deepening our theatrical experience on the whole by bringing the still-acute questioning about the relations between the native presence and our American societies. Something similar, but at the same time different in its form of expression, can be found in Monique Mojica's theatrical experimentations, performances, and theatrical staging. Now, unfortunately, I don't have captures of Monique Mojica's plays, and I just took some pictures of her on the internet to show who she is. So, we have a different ring of native theater with Monique Mojica's plays, since she sanders her attention at a different level than Andinox does. There is certainly suffering, traumas, and wounds to be cured here too, but Mojica seems to tackle these issues not only with the healing of the soul, but with something slightly different that has to do with consciousness and self-consciousness. Mojica does that using theatrical processes that she developed according to narrative techniques that enable her to tell stories and more to the point to tell different stories and even better, her stories. As a proud heiress of Spider Woman Theater, Monique, as we were told, is the daughter of Gloria Miguel here tonight. She applies the principle of narrating people's story. When Spider Woman Theater was founded in 1976 in New York City by Maria Miguel, her sister Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo, it was all about allowing women to speak their own language as women, feminists, and native people, and to tell the stories that belonged to them first. Storytelling and story weaving became then the hallmark of Spider Woman Theater, the name referring to the happy goddess who, according to the mythical tradition, learned to humans how to weave or taught them the art of weaving. This art of weaving became also Monique Mojica's own theatrical principle that she developed along the lines of biographical and autobiographical situations, allowing her to change the stories we hear in cultural narratives and in doing so to change historical narratives and then history itself as we are used to hear and read it. Mojica Kouna Rapahanok, the descent born in New York City and working in Toronto, Canada since the early 1980s, has developed a quite unique persona of her own. In plays such as Bird Woman and the Suffragettes, the story of Sacajawea in 1991, or Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots in 1990, or again in her experience with the scrubbing project, within the turtle gals performing ensemble, as well as in her play, Chocolate Woman and the Milky Way, Mojica is exploring the ways in which and by which a native feminist perspective can be brought to stage. In order to do so, there's another picture of one of her performance, but again taken from the web. In order to do so, there is a work of deconstruction that has to take place since the stereotypes affect both women and native people in general. So is the case with the plays Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, a mostly one-woman show where Mojica plays all the different characters accompanied on stage by Alejandra Núñez as musician and side actress. And I believe the show was actually directed by Nouriel, right? And where Mojica enters dressed as a princess, that's the name of the character, princess buttered on both sides, a caricature of the traditional corn ritual turned into a contemporary farce. Before transforming herself into Pocahontas, the celebrated historical cliche of cultural assimilation, and then into Malinche, the traitor whore of the Mexican folklore, and into Mary Margaret Madeline before impersonating the cigar store squaw, the spirit animal, and a contemporary woman. All these different characters become the questioning journey of a woman that accompanies those various representations in order to undermine their representational fiction, and likewise revise the fictional capacity of representation that unfortunately ensconces us into the dire realities of our everyday culture. The historical situations into which we find ourselves today, where women or native people are still often trapped in senseless representations of themselves, have their rooting in the historical conditions that are reproduced in spite of their absurd character, and theatrical expression must come to terms, quite literally, with those used up and degrading situations. Magica shows on stage how this is possible through the many phases of her own persona and self-transformations. By throwing herself into this historical exploration where self-identity is so profoundly at stake and so misrepresented traditionally, Mojica captures the moments where we can become conscious or self-conscious of our own being. And this requires that we go through the telling and retelling of stories which enable us to become who we are, or rather, who we are becoming. In that respect, she seems to be following Gertrude Stein's ideas expressed in The Making of Americans about the possibility that someday there will be the realization that everyone who was, is, and will be, will be able to tell his or her own story, because this is the only way through which a legitimate access to their own being can happen. The place of narratives, and even more so of self-narratives, appears to be the place par excellence to be, and simply to be. For Mojica, this represents the task of representation, and it is highly political since we are all actors through our own persona, our own personal story and history. Here, the personal is or becomes political because the political is or becomes personal. In her play, and that's the last, it's not a picture of the play that I'm talking about, but it's a picture, again, of Mojica taken on the internet. In her play, Bird Woman and the Souffragettes, the story of Sacajawea. Mojica mixes quite skillfully the story of Susan B. Anthony, one of the great figures of the Souffragettes movement in the late 19th century, opening the path to full citizenship for women, with the much less well-known figure of Sacajawea, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark Expedition through the Rockies in the early 19th century, opening the path for the national unification of the continental territory of the United States. Mojica portrays, again in a very interesting modernist narrative that is telescoping historical eras and geographical settings into a contemporary staging, the possibility of regenerating representations of our history in order to reframe them according to new standards. In the last scene of this play, Mojica borrows a scene from Gertrude Stein's play The Mother of Us All, a play from 1946, devoted to Susan B. Anthony, and replaces Sacajawea inside the statue inaugurated then that should commemorate how our world came to be. Through such figures. This substitution allows Mojica to reinstall the historical significance of this specific native woman figure because characters like Sacajawea are always underestimated in their contribution to such achievements. For Stein, Susan B. Anthony, that fought for women's right to vote, is The Mother of Us All. For Mojica, The Mother of Us All is Sacajawea, this forgotten Chauchan woman who opened the national territory to the United States. To replace history in its own good place, true storytelling, could be Mojica's main idea that she is able to tell with her own persona, that is to say with her own life history that becomes the basis of her theatrical characters. Her own self as an actress, feminist, native woman has become able because of the role that she can perform both on stage and in real life. Two universes here mix into each other to tell stories that say who she is and through that retell us who we are. This is done through weaving narratives just like the Kuna Molas, the weaving that women do in Panama and Western Columbia. Inspired by traditional native practices, Mojica is putting them at work in her theatrical experimentations. Doing so, she is involved in weaving new life patterns that are more suitable to the requirements of our times, acting as a transcultural agent of change. And I come now to my conclusion. So that's where we are with the Renaissance of Native Theater. Drew Haydn-Taylor that I won't have time to present and discuss here has shown very eloquently in his play, Alternative. It's a very interesting... you write it, Alter, Capital A, Native, Alternative. So he shows very eloquently how we are all caught in all kinds of alienated cultural representations today and especially so when we try to establish their pure and straightforward definitions. With this characteristic, with his characteristic irony, with and humor, and taking Brecht's distanciation principle into account, Taylor reveals how the native spirit can debunk any kind of pretension about the ultimate and absolute values that we share, be it a cultural, personal, national, etc. Given that we should always be ready to examine how they make us happy or sad, satisfied or frustrated, or in one word, how appropriate they are for living together. It's a very different kind of theater that we have there too. The three examples that I selected are very different ways of doing theater. Perhaps this is a lesson that we learn when we pay attention to Native theater today. In its multiple manifestations and its wide variety of different expressions, Native theater is well and alive and its renaissance is a promise of even better realizations in the future. If we are ready to acknowledge that our societies need to take into account their rootings in the American continent. In the conclusion of my book, I underlined that Native theater is now challenging and changing the theatrical scene all over the Americas, with experimentations like those of Yuyashkhani in Peru, to Debaji Mujig on Manitoulin Island on Lake Huron. I most especially noted that the renaissance of Native theater also means the renaissance of Native cultures all across the Americas. And in that respect, that the pre-Columbian past is not only behind us, but it is before us. That is to say, on the stage of different theaters and also projecting us towards the future. If this future is to be trans-cultural as Native theater shows us, then we might be able to talk about a renaissance that applies to every one of us that are ready to take part in a theatricality that goes far beyond the stage. So, thank you. Do you need these, you think? First of all, again, thank you for traveling all the way from Montreal. That seems sometimes to be further away than other places. I'm always stunned that Canadian writers are actually quite well known. The playwrights in Paris or Berlin, but here in New York you don't see them. We don't know enough about them. It seems to be a time wall or something in between. So thank you for coming over. And of course, thank you both for joining. Maybe we start... When you hear that talk, what comes to your mind? If you can, the microphone... You have to put it up to you. So many things come... We don't have enough time, I think, to go through everything that came to my mind. Starting with the end, I agree that by acting and getting out your story we can move to the future and learn and heal. Healing is very important to all our stories and to the audiences that we perform for. We've always made sure... Make sure that there's healing and feeling and understanding wherever we go. The one thing that I have... I thought of was that for many, many years Native culture has been put into theater and worked on. And I have been aware of it and my family had been aware of it since 1930 in New York, in Brooklyn. As a family, my father, who came from Kunayala and my mother is Rapa Hanuk from south of Virginia, married and lived in Brooklyn. How they met was another interesting story but growing up in an Italian neighborhood. The only thing that kept us alive and still is keeping us going is our stories that we told to each other and the stories that other Natives brought to us in Brooklyn. So we had a culture of... Well, during the 1930s there were a lot of rodeos and Wild West shows and Native people came from all over north, south, east and west and somehow they ended up in our home many times. So we had an introduction as a little child to all Native nations and this saved our lives in Brooklyn, in an Italian neighborhood who people thought we were savages. So stories, stories, stories, sounds, sounds and movement. I still think of when my father's friends came and they all on Sunday afternoons and they would sing and tell stories and the sounds... still go through me and all my work. So when I started performing with my father and the family, all those sounds and movements and thoughts and stories were there and my first memory is performing with my family at a church in Brooklyn where we were sitting on replicas I guess of stones, the family. A chorus in our background singing. We were posed in beautiful Native positions and they sang, oh, beautiful for spacious skies and there in me came out, no, no, no. And from then on I was interested in how to perform and make sense out of the beautiful life traditions that we had to what was made us to be and to fight us. And this type of thing I still feel in my system, no, it's not like that. No, it's not. The story has to come from you, your feeling, your blood, your wisdom. And that's the only connection that I can make right now is that the individual flight of a plight and story has to come from the real life. And it may be it would be a repetition of we will say target, target, target, go to the start, I don't know. But it's more, you know, it's more life, living, feeling, reality, I guess. And that's where, you know, I did study theater all over the place but actually we did, Spider Woman, we have a PhD in theater. But it's something else is missing, the real life, not what it looks like, the real life. But as we were discussing a little earlier about that, I thought, well, this is a very interesting point and I totally agree. And I sort of thought, well, maybe after all, Gertrude Stein also was influenced in many ways by oral culture. I have to remember that she was one of the first ones to bring oral culture to literature. And that oral culture for her was very important. For example, she was influenced by the way African-American people express themselves. You can see that in her novel, Melanta. And so I know that there might be something that are shared by both the way that you understand this, the place of oral culture, oral culture in theater. But then I think that might share that with some ideas that Stein had on the matter, too. And I'm not saying that it's been imposed by Stein or anything like that, but it's a very striking thing that there's some very interesting parallels between the way that she understood how she could transform literature and theater, actually, by referring to this, just the way we live, the way we talk, and that this became the very core of her theatrical and literary experimentations. So maybe she was influenced by native people. Who knows? Mariel, what do you think? Well, first of all, I think this is our protocol, that one time I was talking with an audience like this and I was talking about theater and at one point an Ojibwe woman got up and asked me, well, who are you? And I realized that I really skipped over protocol. I did not tell them who we are. We have to know when we're listening to people who their grandmothers and grandfathers are, where they come from. So that's what I'm going to do right now. New 80. My name is Mariel Miguel, bright son, Waga Nadele. I am from a star family. I am Kuna from Kuna Yala and Rappahannak from Virginia. I grew up in Brooklyn. My mother and father met in Brooklyn. I am truly a city Indian and am proud of it. I am the director of Spider Woman Theater. We are over 40 years old and we have been storytelling all that time. Okay. New 80, thank you. Okay, now I'll talk. Well, the fact that we talk about discovery and my feeling is we're not lost. We were never lost and that's very important for us to remember that. The other thing is, and I say this all the time, for us by us, meaning the stories that come from us really come from us and we have not had that opportunity for a very long time. Maybe that's a renaissance. Maybe the renaissance comes from that we were forbidden. But that does not mean that we did not do this. It does not mean that we lost it. We've been going on way before Gertrude Stein started. We talked about this way before Gertrude Stein talked about it. I love Gertrude Stein, but she's no Indian and I think you have to really think about that. You know that we've been doing this for thousands of years. It's when the colonial people came in that things changed and we have to think about that all the time too. You know, and I think this is another thing I think. There was a man named Carl May who wrote all these terrible stories about Native people. He was, I don't know, in prison in Germany someplace. And one of them was Winnetou. Now what I think of, Winnetou had a sister and the sister was beautiful. She was really, really beautiful. Why was she beautiful? Because she looked like a white woman and he carried on about how beautiful her features were. She looked just like a white woman. And this is what I think of when I hear the kind of talk like this. I think of, so if we work and do our stuff and it's white and it's acceptable for people, then that's our comparison. We're doing it like white people, so we're good. And so, and I keep on hearing that. You know that I am, oh I'm a couple of shades darker but I have white features, so I'm a couple of shades darker. And I write like a white man. And I think that's another thing that we think about that it's not a renaissance. We've been doing this all this time. It's never been a renaissance for us. Whether we were doing it subrosa or we were screaming it from the mountains. This is what we do. All the stories we tell. Monique comes from a family of storytellers. She's been taught by her mother and me. She knows it from her, you know, from her toenails all the way up what storytelling is, how to search for storytelling. And that is really, again, important to us. But now because of a lot of the restrictions we can start the last 40 years or more. It's not really yelling from the rooftops that who we are and what we do. That doesn't mean that it's a renaissance. That doesn't mean, who discovered us? That's what gets me. Who discovered us? I wasn't discovered by anybody here. You know that this is not a renaissance in that way. All of us. Thompson Highway, Beth Brandt, Christos, Yvette Nolan. All of us have been writing for a long, long time. But it's not only us that's been writing. It's been the other, their mothers and fathers have been writing and their grandmothers and on and on and on have been writing. Not writing like you think, but writing from the mouth. We really do. We write from the mouth. And I think that's another thing we have to think about. So listening to it, it's hard. It's hard for my sister and I to listen to it because we don't accept it that way. We dance when we talk about repetition and we dance. We dance from the ground up. When we look and talk to people, sometimes we hear other things. It doesn't mean we're cute little Indians. It means that we are here differently. That's all. And there are many of us that are here differently. The Irish are here differently. I cannot accept the word renaissance, really. I cannot accept that word because we are not a renaissance. We are living and fighting people for a very long time and I don't want to be compared to other people. I want us to have our own. I think I understand. Actually, I agree with you. Maybe the place where we do not exactly agree is on the meaning of renaissance, for one thing. Sounds like you're patronizing me. No. I'm not. I just want to figure it out. I'm not saying that, well, Lloyd, I tried to explain it. The renaissance would mean, right now, at least two things, two different things, that the theatrical expression of native, well, the native theatrical expression, I should say, is now being, it seems to me, much more recognized than it was before. That's one thing. The other thing is, and it is being produced much more than it was before. And in Canada, it all started in the 1980s. If you look in the 1940s, there was no theatrical production of that kind. That's not true. Well, of that kind, and this is very important. That's not true. Okay, that's not true. Okay, but I'm happy if I can learn things about that, too. The other thing is that I think that renaissance has to be understood in terms of the meeting, the meeting of cultures that it does represent. Because if, as I tried also to explain at first, the problem with the conquest of the Americas and the resistance that was against the conquest and everything like that, was that it was made at a period of time when Europe was experiencing a development that was called renaissance for them. But then when it came to the Americas, it sort of really destroyed Native cultures that were here because they were not receptive about Native cultures. So that's what... That's it, that's it. And there's been genocide. There's been slavery. There's been all kinds of like violence and repression and whatnot that were imposed on Native cultures here all across the Americas. And in some places, it meant extinction of Native populations. So I think that the situation is a little different today because I think that there is this expression, this Native expression that is taking the stage in a very significant manner. Also, I'd like to... But maybe you can tell me if I'm right when I say that, that the experimentation, the theatrical experimentation that you've initiated at Spider Woman really brought something new to the stage. Did it? No. If you're talking about how we look at theater, how we tell stories, all our creation stories go on and on and on. Repeating. And it doesn't matter where you begin. You can start at the end and start the story, the middle you start the story in the beginning. It doesn't matter where you begin. Sometimes there's five people telling the story at the same time. But this is part of our tradition. This is how we have always worked. It's just that I came along and insisted that we should go back to that. We should talk like that. We should bring it back here. There was another thought I had about that. Oh, yeah. Well, you start to talk about that there was no beginning of the native storytelling. But there was on the white side. When you start talking about that, you're talking about the Wild West shows, the odors, Tom Mix, all of that. And that was one of the reactions that kept us going, too, because that was all bullshit. And so we continued to tell our stories, even though dancers with wolves, you know. So they talked in another language. So what? You know, it didn't mean anything. It was the same heroic thing about saving a white man. So all of that, for us, in my mind, it goes like this. You know, you have all the Wild West shows, the dancers with wolves, all of this stuff here. So we go down past that layer, and we pull up all the other layers, the layers, the true layers. That's what we want, and that's the surfaces that we want. And so, yeah, goodbye. So as a question for both of you, do you feel in New York City that people are listening more? Do you feel Spider-Man or Native American theater, Indigenous theater has bigger ears now, or do you think it's the same or than before? Do you feel what? Do you feel that there is more interest, as Jean-François said, into your theater, women's theater? I know you're thinking about creating a theater space. But do you feel, is there a new listening, or is it getting worse or more, less? Well, I feel more and more. The older I get. I think that's what keeps me alive. That's why I'm still performing, because there's so much more that still hasn't been brought out. It's still going on, each nation, all the Indian folks, Native folks, and Kuniala are telling their stories in many ways, and they still go over the story of how the missionaries came and took over Kuniala, and how they had to fight, and they're still fighting, and they still have reproductions of that every February. And the theater, that's only in Kuniala. Now, there's so many nations going through the Americas, and the story is still being told, and there are the children that we have to talk to and tell you a story so that they can go on. And sometimes I think it's like an iceberg. We're just doing the top. There's so much that we have to discover, and my daughter's going on, my grandson's going on, my niece is going on. No, I think yes. There's still a lot to do and a lot to talk about. We're trying to do it. I think one of the things that happened to us was that we have theater groups in New York City, and three of them applied for grants, and there was a big hoohah about it because there were so many Native grants, people that wanted grants, three Native groups, they're going to have to share that money. And they started this whole thing, and I thought to myself, well, there's African American groups, there's more than three. There's Asian groups, there's more than three. There's Latino groups, there's more than three, and there's certainly more than three in white people. So why us? Why are we called the glut on the market? You know what I mean? So that's one of the reasons why I want a theater space. I want a theater in New York City for us, by us. And that's I'm on a crusade. So tell us a bit about the idea of your theater. I want a big theater. I want a theater with lights and a lobby and chairs and everything that people can come to, that different Native theater groups can come to, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, that people can experiment in this group. I want, I keep it up, because I have it in my eyes, my mind, what it looks like, right? So I want a studio space, rehearsal halls, a place that's an office for us, that again, all of us can use. We don't have that here. Other places have it. We are the only ones of everyone that has never been given a space of all these different groups that have been in New York City. How is the situation in Canada? It's pretty much the same. I mean, when the center in Toronto opened in the early 80s, it was a true... No, no, the performing arts. It was the first of its kind in Canada. And it did, I think we can say it did pretty well in the, you know, 35 years of existence. In terms of bringing native expression downtown Toronto, you know, I think that was something new. Of course, it was always there, because you always had native people in Toronto. But to have their own space there, that was something, I mean, that made a difference, really made a difference. And it's now, it's very well... Yeah, well, there they have a real theatre. Yeah, yeah. And all of us use it. But that's the only one in Canada. No, it isn't. There's one, there's the one at Trent. It's a theatre. Only trouble is it's a Trent. Right. What you're saying about, what you're saying about, you know, that you want your theatre here in New York City, well, the same can be said in Montreal. Yves, Syoudurin and Catherine Jean-Carr, they are fighting very hard in order to get a place, well, of their own meaning, a theatre that would be dedicated to native theatre. And they're fighting for that in Montreal now, right? Yeah. And we're doing this here now. I think Quebec has no native theatre. Well, Quebec City? No, no, no, no. Not in terms... Well, not in terms of a space that would be managed and owned by the native community there, or no, no. We find that Montreal, Quebec is pretty racist when you talk about native people. They still go back to things like, well, you don't pay taxes, that kind of thing. It's true. Yeah, sure, sure. There's still tons of prejudices. Tons, I know. That's why I think that, on Dinoc, for instance, what they've done in the last 35 years, 33 years in Montreal, is just fantastic. That's why I have so much interest in that, in there. And we're still working together. We're going to do a book on their production of the Rabinah Lachi, which is a thing that is like a very extraordinary experience that they have there. And it's worth having this into a book that will sort of perpetuate the memory of that. See, when I was working in Quebec City, I didn't feel like that. I felt the people that came came from all the reserves around to see what the work was and how they were performing. And what they were saying was that we never had this. This never happens to us. We want this to go on. But this was five years ago, at least. And that's pretty... And with the same prejudice, it was the same bias that had happened before. So, you know, I think they will go on. There's at least three reserves that are there that are working that way. Should we maybe open up, put up some light to the audience? And we have a microphone also here. So if you have a comment or a question, it doesn't have to be a question. It doesn't have to be a comment. Well, actually, I just want to say a couple of things that some of which might be helpful. First of all, as far as getting a space in New York, in my experience, it's all about money. We know that. Yeah. So that's part of it. You're going to do it. I hope so. And I certainly hope so. No hope. Going to. I also think that there are places... I mean, there are places where I think there is some hope. In Winnipeg, there is a First Nations community center. They're trying to get a theater in there. There are places outside of New York, outside of New York or Toronto or Montreal where they're trying to do it. But also, I think... I don't know. Maybe I was raised differently. I always got... I agree with you that it's not a renaissance. The renaissance is everything, is in essence in the non-First Nations community that they're having a renaissance and that they're maybe becoming more aware of it. But I'm under the impression that, not just with theater, and I guess you can comment on this, that with Canada in particular, but also with the United States, there's a reason why the term First Nations came up, which is that that is what is originally... that is Canada. That is for everybody else is catching up to that. So you have a question? No, I'm making a comment for everybody to comment on. So I, to me, I'm just saying that, just to react to that, that what about the actual notion that to be Canadian or to be American would be to the foundation and the basis of that would be First Nations or Native American, whatever you would call it, would be Indian culture. That is the foundation. Everything else is secondary to that, if you have a comment on it. Well, you know, what we're doing now with Spider Woman, that we work both ways over the border. We bring natives from Canada into the states and we bring the stateside into Canada. We work up at Nipissing North Bay on that reserve and we bring everyone together to work together. And we feel, or I feel, I should say, that these are borders that have been made by other people and not us. What about the West, like California? Is there a collaboration? Or is it just New York that's not interested? Is that a different situation? Well, I'm working on New York. No, just for us to know. But there's something in Los Angeles. There's a great thing that's happening in Los Angeles with the Autry Theatre. And they were working in Oregon. Was it Oregon? And they had, like, a festival there. They have all these people, you know, West Doody's sister and different people like that that have come in and started to work. They had a festival. They had at least three or four plays, native plays going on. In the American Art Institute, also in Santa Fe, that works. You know, they have... Politically also. Politically, yeah. And Mexico. You know, there are people that come from the states that go there to work, native people. And my sisters also went to Panama to work with Kuna, and they did workshops there, you know. Very interesting. Just a thought and then a question. So I went to a talk on Manhattan 5,000 years ago. And originally, the trail that was called Broadway was an indigenous and an animal trail that went all the way to Canada. Just thought you'd like to know that that's a couple of blocks away. And the thing that got my attention, and I love what you're saying, about the title of the Unundown, of Healing the Soul. Oh, did I? Yeah. What about healing the soul of the white people? Well, I'm not interested in that. But they need to... We need to understand something that we don't understand. You know, it's... Well, I mean, a lot of the culture. What do you think? I think that it's the relation that has to be cured. The relation between native cultures and populations and settlers, let's say, populations and cultures. And it's the relation that caused the... let's say, the traumas. And that is still going on, by the way, right? You're absolutely right about prejudices and stuff like that. But this is, in my view, totally wrong. And it has to be changed. How do you change that? And I think that native theatrical expression is working in the direction of changing that. Because it is not only addressed to native audiences, but it is also addressed to settlers or white audiences, right? And in that respect, it moves them. It moves every people who attend those representations. And it makes... Also, it makes them think about who they are, what they're doing there, what is their relationship to native people. And in that respect, I think that the theatrical expression, native theatrical expression, is very important. It's a key point towards some kind of reconciliation or healing. Because if you look at it that way, I think that we're doing harm to ourselves continually if we don't look at what's been done. And this is the way that I look at things. It is not... When I talk about Renaissance, it might be a controversial term. But at the same time, it points to the possibility, like I said, of meeting different cultures and transforming those cultures in terms of... I mean, the way I've sort of analyzed, and I have to persist in saying that it seems to me that these are new forms, even though they're part of a tradition and cultural traditions, they are expressed in new forms. And that's what matters to me as a sociologist, let's say. And also as a spectator, because I'm interested in attending plays that are interesting in terms of what they put on stage in the forms that they put it on stage. And I think that these forms are very important. And I think that even though cultural traditions, native cultural traditions are important in that respect, they are fundamental, they are being transformed in the way that they are expressed in their contemporary form. And that's what I think is the possibility for reaching wider and deeper in the audience. Yeah, I feel that we're always asked this question of how can we help and work on having other people understand us, and my feeling is, why ask us? It's talk among yourselves, you know, that you have to figure it out, not the people that you've been trying to oppress to tell you what you should do. I really feel that way, don't ask us, do it. That also, you know, you have to learn by watching and feeling just like we did growing up as children. That's how we learn to dance, that's how we learn to sing. You know, that is an onus on you. One more, one last? Oh, yeah, one and two. Thank you very much, it's very interesting. I wonder since you are saying that theater is taking new forms, and I wonder what the future would hold for such forms. How do you think the theater would develop in the near and the far future if it's holding new forms today? And what are the external factors that would create these new forms? For me, because I think that we might have different answers to that question, but my simple answer would be through experimentation. There's no other way in terms of experimenting new forms of expressions, and sometimes it fails, sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's good, and it achieves a something. But I think that, and you have many examples of that, of very convincing expressions in native theater as it is done today. You know, he's right, and he's wrong. My feeling is I've been asked, why do I use pop music? Why do I use songs from musicals? Why do I use rap when I'm working with all the ways I work? And my feeling is, and this is where he's right, we're growing up, we're living in this whole thing of a milieu of words and talk and rap and all of this. Well, we should use it also, and that's what I do. And out of it, young students come to me and they've put together all kinds of stuff that's really interesting on rap, on songs, on all of this. But with things that their grandmas and grandpas taught them at the same time, and that's what's exciting. You know that that kind of life is there. And I've seen it, because I used to work at a place called the Center for Indigenous Theater, and I see these young people really starting to blossom, really starting to use everything we taught them and more and then going back and now looking at their languages and bringing their languages forward. And that's really, yeah, it's very exciting now, yeah. And I think both works. I worked in Brooklyn with children at the YMCA and they just came from Mexico and Peru to live in New York to tell their stories. They got a lot of reaction from their parents. So they have to learn how to fight because their parents said, we're in New York now, we're forgetting about that. That's the past. We're in the United States and we have to speak English and we have to find new stories. But those old stories that those children came with were beautiful and wonderful and would it be healing for them? So both has to be done, the old and the new and putting them together with children and adults. Thank you. One last question. Hi, thank you all so much for this really engaging conversation. My question is specifically for Gloria and Muriel. So I wanted to learn a little more about what you understand as the relationship between storytelling and performance in native theater. And as you were growing up and learning from your parents, how has this relationship evolved from then to what you're doing now with your theater company? How has that relationship evolved in terms of the themes that you were exploring say 30 years ago to the kinds of themes that you're trying to explore today? Okay, I can't understand exactly what you're saying. Is it? Yeah. She says the storytelling that you learn from your parents or grandparents, how did it evolve over 30, 40 years of work? Are there different themes you are interested in now than 30 years ago? Are they the same stories and you just present them differently? Well, we have many, many stories. How about the mic? Oh, forget about it. We started with a piece called Women in Violence and we attacked the violence in our lives, our private lives, and the world. Our second one was Sun, Moon, and Feather, which was about our own personal family feelings. And we have how many stories now? 25 different stories from different subjects. That piece we worked on together before we had three sisters. One passed away. That was about, I forgot. What was that one about? We had so many. Anyway. Are there reverberations? No, that was after reverberations. The reverberations was one of what we got from our ancestors and the reverberations, the feelings, the stories that we really inherited. Resistance of memory. She forgot it. What is it? Resistance of memory. Of memory. Anyway, so the last one was working with the women in Canada and the fighting now for what's going on with the world and women being murdered and raped and killed and how that goes on. And I left a whole bunch out. But I don't know if that answers your story. The subjects went on forever. Some just go back to our own heritage. Kuna life and Kuna geography and expression. And there's more. There's more that can come out. What has happened to us is that this is a platform for us. Forty or more years ago we did women in violence. About five years ago when we really started to look at the murdered and missing women we realized that a lot of things was happening in the outside world and there was low tolerance for beating and molesting. But where we were and in the native communities it was the same. So we had to start to think about and talk about how do we take care of this? How do we go in? How do we talk? And again it came with tradition. We talked to elders, we talked to ourselves, we came in as elders and I was really amazed. I did a piece that I had not done for a very long time and it had, one part was a beating. And when I finished showing it women came up to me and they said that happened to me, me too. Me too before me too was me too. It was overwhelming having women come up to me and whisper in my ear and talk to me about what happened to them and I realized at that moment that we really had to go back in and look at that old piece called Women in Violence and bring in younger women, us and just bring them in and start to talk about violence again. And this is our latest piece called Material Witness. But with it comes a whole way again of talking about this. Can women talk about it? How can they talk about it? Where can they talk about it? We made circles. We did sewing circles and we gave women material so that they could use their hands as they told these stories. If they did not want to tell their stories, we said we would carry those patches in our set. So our set is made up of all these patches and we went to different reserves and reservations and did this and it's very simple. It's like bringing all this fabric out and then saying to them what fabric reminds you of you and then what fabric that you love or you love someone and we just layered it like that. The next one was is there a secret and is it in the shadows? So we gave them fabric and buttons and lace and all kinds of things, glitter and paste and anything. And women did that. They made these beautiful things and at the end, the last one was what is your legacy? What do you want to leave behind? We went around the circle and talked and we talked and sometimes it was very scary and sometimes it was... All kinds of things, people cried, people laughed and that's what we're doing now. We do these fabric workshops. It's part of this other thing of the show Material Witness. The thing is that Material, it's easier to tell that story. You know I never connected it to Me Too until just now when I said that because it is Me Too and we started that Me Too with us way before that. This is why Spider Woman Theater, Spider Woman Theater is of significance and has kept up tradition but also reinvented or reinterpreted it. As someone says it is so important to learn from history because then you know that we don't learn from history. You should never forget it and it is true. So really, thank you for coming. It's an open ended of course discussion. There's no, as you said, we could have started in the middle of the beginning of men. It won't end with here. We won't be unable to touch on all of it and it will be our ongoing here at the Segal Center but thank you for coming back. I think the third time you were with us or fourth. So thank you and also thank you for coming and bringing your work and having it as a thing in the room because we could have that discussion about. And I really do think New York City should have a place, should have a Native American Theater, Indigenous Theater. It's shameful that it does not exist and I hope that this evening also it's a small contribution. Oh, job of people that we want one. We will. So thank you so much and thank you all for coming. We have a little reception here in the room if you want to have a drink or maybe you have another question to ask or you want to go a little bit deeper into it. So please do so again. Thank you all for coming.