Native women artists share practice, fears, hopes

Last week, at Augsburg College, six exceptional Native women artists spoke about their work. Moderator Ananya Chatterjee, University of Minnesota dance professor, posed questions, the audience also.

Here are some powerful takeaways.

Ananya first asked what the global women's movement could learn through a centering of Native feminist values.

Rosy Simas, Seneca dance artist, responded: "We are matrilineal. I've always wished for more focus on giving voice to women in our community."

Rhiana Yazzie, Navajo filmmaker: "To help each other get out of the scarcity mindset. To recognize that we're a whole people with families with histories. To make the world a better place."

Ojibwe filmmaker Elizabeth Day, her preschool son sitting next to her, stressed her desire to teach him that color has no gender.

Sharon Day, youth theater leader and community activist, underscored the centrality of grandmothers' leadership and unconditional love.

Ojibwe writer Marcie Rendon spoke to the urgency of following Native thinking. " ... making sure there is clean water not just for us but for everyone."

Ojibwe writer Heid Erdrich shared her love of doing deep research, talking to older Native women, traveling to New York to ask women elders about the origins of our culture. "Among us, I feel a respect through the generations – that's not true of many other cultures."

Ananya then asked each how they understood "excellence."

Marcie responded: "One of the first times I read my poetry on stage, in O'Shaughnessy auditorium, three Native women in the front row were crying. That's how I knew what I was doing was the right thing!" She recalled experiencing Sharon Day's youth theater play, "Everything is a Circle," about the Carlisle boarding school. "When the questions came, the youth actors cried as well." Sharon shouted out: "That's healing!" That's one measure of excellence: how artists and audiences respond!

Rosy shared her choreographing of a piece about her grandmother. "My work is very abstract. I wanted to do this show for my people. I took it to a university near the Fredonia, New York Seneca community. Ten people from my reservation came! I had no idea how they were going to receive this work. They liked it a lot. The woman I spoke to afterward said she understood everything. It's a completely abstract work! To me, that's excellence!"

Rhiana responded: "I've loved many artists' works, especially those that made me see a dimension of myself I hadn't realized. I've met excellent artists who made me feel so small - I do not find their art excellent. Some artists thrive on diminishment of others to create power for themselves." Heid added: Excellence is supposed to be about being ahead of someone else or others. But I think of it as opening a path and having others coming along with you. A kind of momentum... that's what I would be proud of."

Sharon reflected: "Whatever I do is excellent, because I know how I do things! I've spent hours putting something together, and I wouldn't do it any other way. I think about organizations like the Guthrie. For their plays, they have more production people in the room than we have in my whole agency. In my theater work with kids, I'm the executive producer, playwright, van driver, director, stagehand, set maker. We're everything. We must see our work as being excellent!"

Marcie reflected: "I have no professional training as a writer, no MFA. But I'm a published and performed playwright. I love the process, stringing a bunch of words together! At a meeting of Native writers, Marc Anthony Rollo, Bad River Ojibwe, said, 'We have the obligation to be the next Hemingway!' I completely disagree. I want to write plays, books, stories that people will want to read and enjoy. But we also face an audience challenge: when white students from Wayzata read our work, they won't understand the context."

An audience member asked the panel what each woman feared most.

Heid shared, "There's always a point in creative work where you are afraid of someone. In classical training, they say you must go toward that. But do we? I am asking. I am afraid it might be hard for someone reading it."

Rosy reflected, "I feel and fear hostility. At a National Performance Network conference, there was no acknowledgement of difference. When we work around oppressive powers, we absorb this to a degree. I care most about honoring my passions and avoiding negotiations that would compromise me."

Marcie's response was curt: "If I died tomorrow, what would become of my children and grandchildren?"

Every response was thoughtful!

Sharon: "I'm not afraid." She recounted how she took "Coyote's Carrot," a play about AIDS, to high schools all over Indian country. "First, we showed it to elders and asked permission. We succeeded."

Rhiana spoke: "I fear climate change, the government shutdown. What's going to happen to the earth?"

Rosy shared rehearsing in front of audiences before she is fully ready: "Very scary and liberating at the same time." Rosy also aspires to make works that reflect broader interests, "to see if my story as a middle-aged gay woman reverberates."

Elizabeth told of the magic of stories. "Someone new comes into my family, and everyone yells, 'No, don't start storytelling!' But it always happens, and it's often about me!" This is where you learn, through storytelling! Sometimes there are long periods of silence. Silence is part of the conversation! And then someone will say, "Remember when you said ....?"

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot board member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband Rod Walli.