Responding to an increasing need for critical perspectives and methodologies, this collection traces the historical dimensions of Native North American drama through overviews of major developments, individual playwrights' perspectives, and in-depth critical analyses. Bringing together writers and scholars from the United States, Canada, and Europe, Indigenous North American Drama provides the first comprehensive outline of this vibrant genre. It also acknowledges the wide diversity of styles and perspectives that have helped shape contemporary Native North American theater itself. This interdisciplinary introduction offers a basis for new readings of Native American and First Nations literature at large.

Cultural Writing. Native American Studies. STORIES OF OUR WAY is the first anthology of its kind to span more than thirty years of American Indian theater, including the 1930s classic THE CHEROKEE NIGHT. This distinguished group of twelve plays draws ona rich range of tribal experiences -- Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Kiowa, Navajo, Oneida, Otoe-Missouria, Rappahonack, and urban. They treatthe diverse stories of Native people's ways with gritty integrity, uncompromising honesty, and deep respect, balanced with an awareness of the challenges and responsibilities to renew, and a commitment to an evolving American Indian theatrical aesthetic. These playwrights invite audiences to probe the often painful past, share the enduring values of family, community, and tribe, and celebrate humor and spirituality.

"The drama of negro life is developing primarily because a native American drama is in process of evolution. Thus, although it heralds the awakening of the dormant dramatic gifts of the Negro folk temperament and has meant the phenomenal rise within a decade's span of a Negro drama and a possible Negro Theatre, the significance is if anything more national than racial. For pioneering genius in the development of the native American drama, such as Eugene O'Neill, Ridgley Torrence and Paul Green, now sees and recognizes the dramatically undeveloped potentialities of Negro life and folkways as a promising province of native idioms and source materials in which a developing national drama can find distinctive new themes, characteristic and typical situations, authentic atmosphere. The growing number of successful and representative plays of this type form a valuable and significant contribution to the theatre of today and open intriguing and fascinating possibilities for the theatre of tomorrow"-- Introduction.

This first collection of plays by an Indian playwright presents a spectrum of Indian life that ranges in time from the past to the present and on into the future. Body Indian, the earliest, most widely performed, and most highly acclaimed of Geiogamah's plays, deals with a problem of the present -Indian alcoholism. But the play is not so much about alcoholism as it is about the social and moral obligations that Indian people owe to one another. Foghorn, through the use of humor rather than bitterness, tries to exorcise the harmful stereotyping that often stands in the way of non-Indians' understanding of Indians, and even on occasion of Indians' own appreciation of themselves. In the play 49 the author links the past with the present and points a road to the future. Here the approach is synchronic rather than diachronic. The value of Indian traditions is emphasized -but only where those traditions are used imaginatively and not treated as ossified relics to be blindly venerated. 49 celebrates the continuity of Indian life in the vigor of new forms and with an abiding optimism. This collection of plays-all widely performed and seriously and extensively reviewed-adds a new and important voice to the small body of Indian authors who write about their own people.

This first major collection of contemporary Native American writing for the theatre ranges from the groundbreaking work of Body Indian to the experimental performance style of Spiderwoman Theater. Contains: Indian Radio Days by LeAnne Howe and Roxy Gordon (Choctaw) The Story of Susannah by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl (Hawaiian) Body Indian by Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa) The Woman Who was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance by Diane Glancy (Cherokee) Power Pipes by Spiderwoman Theater (Kuna/Rappahannock) Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth by Drew Hayden Tayler (Ojibway) The Independence of Eddie Rose by Willam S. Yellow Robe, Jr. (Assiniboine/Nakota) The volume includes an introduction by the editor, Mimi Gisolfi D'Aponte, Professor of Theatre at CUNY, and an epilogue by Elizabeth Theobald, director of the Manshantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut.

This foundational study offers an accessible introduction to Native American and First Nations theatre by drawing on critical Indigenous and dramaturgical frameworks. It is the first major survey book to introduce Native artists, plays, and theatres within their cultural, aesthetic, spiritual, and socio-political contexts. Native American and First Nations theatre weaves the spiritual and aesthetic traditions of Native cultures into diverse, dynamic, contemporary plays that enact Indigenous human rights through the plays' visionary styles of dramaturgy and performance. The book begins by introducing readers to historical and cultural contexts helpful for reading Native American and First Nations drama, followed by an overview of Indigenous plays and theatre artists from across the century. Finally, it points forward to the ways in which Native American and First Nations theatre artists are continuing to create works that advocate for human rights through transformative Native performance practices. Addressing the complexities of this dynamic field, this volume offers critical grounding in the historical development of Indigenous theatre in North America, while analysing key Native plays and performance traditions from the mainland United States and Canada. In surveying Native theatre from the late 19th century until today, the authors explore the cultural, aesthetic, and spiritual concerns, as well as the political and revitalization efforts of Indigenous peoples. This book frames the major themes of the genre and identifies how such themes are present in the dramaturgy, rehearsal practices, and performance histories of key Native scripts.

As tourists increasingly moved across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a surprising number of communities looked to capitalize on the histories of Native American people to create tourist attractions. From the Happy Canyon Indian Pageant and Wild West Show in Pendleton, Oregon, to outdoor dramas like Tecumseh! in Chillicothe, Ohio, and Unto These Hills in Cherokee, North Carolina, locals staged performances that claimed to honor an Indigenous past while depicting that past on white settlers' terms. Linking the origins of these performances to their present-day incarnations, this incisive book reveals how they constituted what Katrina Phillips calls "salvage tourism"—a set of practices paralleling so-called salvage ethnography, which documented the histories, languages, and cultures of Indigenous people while reinforcing a belief that Native American societies were inevitably disappearing. Across time, Phillips argues, tourism, nostalgia, and authenticity converge in the creation of salvage tourism, which blends tourism and history, contestations over citizenship, identity, belonging, and the continued use of Indians and Indianness as a means of escape, entertainment, and economic development.