Policy, Sovereignty, and Story in Native American Drama
Credit: Nipinet Landsem (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa descendant and citizen of Manitoba Metis Federation)
Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990. The law acknowledged that human remains, and cultural items removed from federal or tribal land belong first to the descendants of the people who lived in those homelands and created those cultural and spiritual items. In other words, contemporary federally recognized tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations could — finally — bring ancestors home. Native people often consider all remains and cultural objects as ancestors, in recognition of unbroken and spiritual kinship ties. The law established guidelines and frameworks for identifying descendancy and mandated compliance from any public or private institution receiving federal funds.
NAGPRA has critics on all sides, institutional and tribal. Public audiences and scientists have sometimes wished they could resist returning “their” objects to Native nations. At the time the law was passed, institutions held more than 200,000 ancestral remains in their collections. While the law is complex, the universality of honoring the dead is not. In her play Antíkoni, Beth Piatote (Nez Perce) asks audiences to recognize that universal value as central to Native American culture and lifeways, and to respect tribal voices when they seek the return of beloved kin.
Antíkoni makes visible the kinds of conversations Native people have about NAGPRA. The story begins in the past, with a recounting of two Cayuse brothers who had been separated as children. One brother was stolen during intertribal warfare and was raised by the Crow Tribe. The brother who remained had grown up amidst Cayuse family and community. Years later, when the U.S. brought a new war to the Cayuse, the stolen brother follows the practice of his Crow father and becomes a scout for the cavalry, while the brother who remained fights for his community. The brothers ultimately fight each other and die. The cavalry buries them together in an unmarked grave. Years later, they are disinterred, separated again, removed to a museum, catalogued, and stored in boxes for study by later generations of U.S. scientists (Piatote, 2019).
Piatote published Antíkoni in her collection The Beadworkers, and while this story is a prologue to the play, readers already have a sense of the loss the Cayuse community feels for these brothers, first with the kidnapping, then their death, then their disappearance from tribal homelands.
The Cayuse brothers are a central point of conflict in the play. Antíkoni’s uncle Kreon is a museum director and has recovered these ancestors and their belongings, purchased on the black market to bring them home. But not all the way home, because Kreon plans to keep them in the museum rather than fully return them to the land. Also, he has failed to repatriate the brothers under the rules of NAGPRA. Following NAGPRA would require the stolen brother to be returned to the Crow Tribe; only the remaining brother could be at home among the Cayuse. Kreon’s actions mean he is running afoul of both tradition and federal law. When Antíkoni learns of Kreon’s plans, she protests and asserts that their kin must be returned to the land and ceremonially buried. Kreon implores Antíkoni to understand that a partial restoration is better than none and adds that if the government discovers his conduct, he will be fired. He notes that his replacement may be someone who possesses no cultural values at all.
This conflict perfectly illustrates the distance between the goals of NAGPRA, a federal law, and the cultural responsibilities of tribal communities. Federally recognized Indian tribes are nations. The relationship between tribal nations and the United States is one between sovereigns, and the U.S. is the trustee for tribes. Tribes existed as political entities long before imperial and colonial expansion in North America, which means that tribal sovereignty pre-dates U.S. sovereignty. Tribal sovereignty is embedded in the U.S. Constitution, recognized and codified through more than five hundred treaties as well as through laws made by Congress and the Supreme Court of the United States. Sovereignty — the inherent right to self-govern — should be an easy concept to understand, but in multiple and various ways over the last 250 years, the U.S. has sought to limit tribal sovereignty. Very few Americans learn these tribal sovereignty fundamentals, and consequently, Americans generally misunderstand tribal rights. This can result in a deep misapprehension of policies such as NAGPRA.
NAGPRA was designed to address the harm caused by the actions of scientists, collectors, and museums in the centuries before its passage. On paper, it recognized tribal sovereignty and reinforced tribal authority. Cumbersome requirements for tribes and institutions, lack of clear processes and oversight, and practices allowing institutions to ignore or overrule tribal authority have meant that NAGPRA’s work remains far from complete. The Department of the Interior oversees NAGPRA, and in 2022 it published a rule to clarify the statute’s work and processes. The agency worked with tribal, museum, and university stakeholders on this update and then opened it for public comment. In December 2023, the agency published the final rule. Among the most significant changes are the mandates to prioritize tribal and Native Hawaiian needs and to defer to their historical and cultural knowledge and the requirement that museums and institutions receive “free, prior, and informed consent [from tribes] before any exhibition of, access to, or research on human remains or cultural items.” The new standard is considerably higher than the 1990 rule. It puts museums and institutions in positions of learning rather than instructing.
The character of Kreon is fictional, but the compromises required by his profession reflect the experiences of Native people working in museums and universities. We are told that institutional adherence to NAGPRA protects our ancestors, but protects them from whom? And for whose benefit? Who decides, and by what measures? These are questions policymakers at all levels must ask as they create or interpret policies. For centuries, rules have been made for Native peoples and tribes; now policies must be made with their consultation. That’s the best practice model in the Department of the Interior’s revision of the rule. The department has learned many lessons in three decades, including the importance of listening to and learning from tribes.
But not everyone has connections to Native communities, nor does everyone make policy. How can socially conscious and intellectually curious folks hear from Native people? They can go to the theatre. Native playwrights are writing more stories connecting contemporary Native lives with historical events, and these narratives illustrate the legacies of damage caused by uninformed and careless policy. Mary Kathryn Nagle’s (Cherokee) play Sovereignty imagines a future where, once again, tribal sovereignty will mean tribes have authority to enforce laws such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), to hold violent non-Native men accountable for their violent actions. Another play, Randy Reinholz’s (Choctaw) Off the Rails shows audiences how federal Indian boarding schools sought to remake Native children regardless of the harm it caused. The histories within the play give insight into the origins of trauma and the ways it has cascaded into subsequent generations.
Policy often distances itself from the world it seeks to shape. Policymakers write in the passive voice as if no one oversaw (or was to blame for) changes resulting from laws or practices. In their plays, Native playwrights are reminding audiences that policies impact real people in a world we share with others. Violence and loss are not just Native issues. Playwrights ask audiences to see, to recognize, to understand. I hope audiences understand the Antíkoni character’s urgent need to follow cultural teachings and see her actions as just even if they cut against federal law. I hope we sympathize with Kreon, caught between keeping culture and keeping his job. It’s a choice no one should have to make. Federal Indian policies are not neutral. They all assert some level of control over tribes and tribal homelands, and thus over Native people. Native theatre offers audiences a chance to understand Native lives, and perhaps one day to bring that knowledge into conversations about policies that directly impact those lives. Native theatre offers the promise of progress to all of us.
Native people have always shared stories, and contemporary Native American drama is part of that tradition. Regional non-profit theatres produce Native plays infrequently, in part, because of very real financial pressures to offer revivals of audience favorites and in part because theatres still falsely believe there aren’t enough actors to fill Native roles. In the last decade, larger theatres in Washington, D.C., and New York have produced a few shows, including The Thanksgiving Play by Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota), which premiered on Broadway in 2023. It was only the second play by a Native American to reach the Great White Way and the first by a Native woman. Meanwhile, Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles has been an Actors’ Equity theatre for more than 30 years, the only one in the US dedicated to developing Native playwrights and theatre artists. Many dozens of plays are held in their archives, reflecting story traditions from across Indian Country, and hundreds more plays are held in other libraries and archives across the US. Unfortunately, most of these literary riches are accessible only on-site. They have not been digitized. A group of theatre makers, librarians, and scholars is working to create a centralized digital resource for these works, a project that will include cultural context and dramaturgical materials, to restore decades of stories to Native communities and theatre audiences.
Story is central to Native American life; it creates links between the past, present, and future. When Native people share stories, they invite listeners into narratives; sharing makes a story complete. The same is true for theatre; theatres are incomplete without audiences. Theatregoers, ask for productions of Native plays, then buy tickets to the shows. Some playwrights post their work to the New Play Exchange. Some do not. The more Native plays are produced, the easier it will be to find vibrant Native stories for the American stage. Antíkoni is a prime example; it’s featured in The Beadworkers and had its premiere at Native Voices at the Autry on November 7, 2024.
About the Author:
Laurie Arnold, PhD, is an enrolled citizen of the Sinixt Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes. She is a Professor of History and Director of Native American Studies at Gonzaga University. She has previously held positions at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago, and she was the founding director of Native American Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame.
Her book, Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2012. Her publications have appeared in scholarly journals including The Public Historian, the Western Historical Quarterly, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, and Collection Management. She has also written about history for TIME Magazine and for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection” exhibit. Her scholarship includes Colville author Mourning Dove, the Indigenous Columbia Plateau, and Indian gaming. Her current research considers how contemporary Native American playwrights are using theatre to tell Native narratives of the past and present, as they stage history for the public.