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MARY KATHRYN NAGLE

Joy Harjo’s Wings || A Revolution on the American Stage

In my family’s blue-sky memory, we loved my father without question. We loved his laugh, his stories, his swinging us through the sky. We struggled with his fight, his jab, and his fear. When I looked through my dreaming eyes, he was still a boy of four standing by his mother’s casket. She was his beloved grandfather’s great-great-granddaughter. She liked to paint, blew saxophone in Indian territory and traveled about on Indian oil money. Still, grief from history grew in her lungs. She was dead of tuberculosis by her twenties. The grief had to go somewhere. We had no one left in our family who knew how to bury it. So it climbed onto her little boy’s back.

Joy Harjo, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light

For too long our grief has had nowhere to go. So we carry it in our lungs. We bury it in our kidneys. It cakes our hearts. We deposit it onto the backs of our children, and our children’s children.

We know our stories are medicine. We know they bring about healing. But we have not been permitted to share them. At this point in history, the American stage has, for the most part, silenced the voice of Native artists.

Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light is exceptional. It is an extraordinary work of extraordinary magnitude for several reasons, but one of its most unique, rare attributes is that it has been presented on a professional American stage. Wings constitutes one of but a small handful of Native plays to have ever been presented on such a stage. For me and the other Native playwrights in my generation, Wings stands as a source of inspiration. The impossible is possible. And now, with the publication of Wings, my hope and prayer is that Americans will come to see that our stories truly are worth reading and staging, and thus for our Native writers, worth writing.

For the generations and generations of American Indians who have never heard or seen a performance by a Native woman on a professional American stage, Joy Harjo’s Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light offers a powerful healing. Harjo’s heroine Redbird takes her audience on a journey through generations of trauma and survival in a musical revelry that celebrates American Indian resistance. For those of us still attempting to make sense of the trauma lodged in our hearts, Wings creates a release valve. Through ceremony, song, and kinship, a public space is created where healing can collectively take place and grief can be processed.

For the generations and generations of non-Natives who have been taught that American Indians are nothing more than the image on the back of a Washington, DC, football jersey, Wings commands a powerful reckoning. Wings introduces non-Native audience members to what will be, for many, their first interaction with an actual Native person.

Redbird’s journey is breathtakingly personal. Of course, when it comes to putting Indians on the American stage, the personal is political. Today, statistics reveal that Americans who go to the theater are more likely to witness the performance of redface onstage than the performance of Native stories by Native people. As a Muscogee Creek woman created by a Muscogee Creek playwright, Redbird is everything her contemporary redface counterparts in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, An Octaroon, and the Wooster Group’s Cry, Trojans! (to name a few) are not. Instead of a costume, a drunk Indian who only grunts onstage, a joke, or a stereotype, Redbird is an articulate Native woman with something intelligent—indeed profound—to say about the attempted destruction of her people and sovereign Tribal Government.

We need to see more Redbirds on the American stage. I lived and wrote plays in New York for five years. I found the entire experience rather depressing. During my five years in New York, I witnessed numerous performances of redface on many of New York’s most prestigious stages. Not once—in all of my five years—did I ever see a non-Native professional theater company produce a full-length play by a Native playwright. Indeed, I arrived three years after the Public Theater workshopped Harjo’s Wings, but they never fully produced it. I am encouraged that this publication of Wings will allow other theaters to now follow the artistic lead of Randy Reinholz and Jean Bruce Scott, co-creators of Native Voices at the Autry, who premiered the work in 2009 in Los Angeles. This is an important play that openly raises consciousness and exposes truths. I know we are ready for more productions.

To be clear, the absence of authentic Native representation on the America stage is no accident. Redface was purposefully created to tell a false, demeaning story. Redface constitutes a false portrayal of Native people—most often performed by non-Natives wearing a stereotypical “native” costume that bears no relation to actual Native people, our stories, our struggles, or our survival in a country that has attempted to eradicate us. The continued dominant perception that American Indians are the racial stereotypes they see performed on the American stage is devastating to our sovereign right to define our own identity. Of course, that’s why it was invented.

In the 185 years since Andrew Jackson drafted and signed into law his Indian Removal Act, portrayals of Native Americans in the American theater have changed very little. The redface performances that originated at the time of removal continue to dominate the American stage today, but for the first time, now, we have the opportunity to change the narrative. We have the opportunity to replace a false representation with a real one.

In this respect, Harjo’s placement of an articulate, brilliant, and musical Native woman front and center on the American stage constitutes nothing less than an act of revolution. Wings is a magnificent rebellion. Redbird’s narrative demonstrates defiance.

In contrast to the majority of contemporary Native representations onstage, the Native protagonist in Wings does not grunt incoherent sounds, nor does she portray the loss of her Muscogee ancestral homelands as a joke in a modern day rock musical. Instead, the reality of the Trail of Tears is introduced as a shared communal experience of survival, an experience that continues to shape the journey and identity of Muscogee Creek Nation citizens today. Harjo writes,

CEHOTOSAKVTES CHENAORAKVTES MOMIS KOMET AWATCHKEN OHAPEYAKARES HVLWEN

Two beloved women sang this song on the trail of tears. One walked near the front of the people, one near the back. When either began to falter, they would sing the song to hold each other up.

DO NOT GET TIRED. DON’T BE DISCOURAGED. BE DETERMINED, TO ALL COME IN. WE WILL GO TO THE HIGHEST PLACE. WE WILL GO TOGETHER. (22)

The power of Harjo’s portrayal of the Trail of Tears is not that Andrew Jackson is transformed from hero into villain (as one might imagine a Native playwright would want to do), but rather, the power comes from the fact that both Jackson’s presence and his voice are erased entirely. In Wings, Andrew Jackson’s voice is replaced with the voice of Redbird. Indeed, the only mention of Andrew Jackson in this Muscogee story comes in a few short lines on page 27:

Don’t ever forget the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, said my father. Andrew Jackson’s forces killed almost everyone as we stood to protect our lands. Your grandfather Monahwee was shot seven times and still survived.

The power of this replacement cannot be underestimated. In the United States today, Andrew Jackson continues to be celebrated as a hero. His face adorns the most common form of our currency, the twenty-dollar bill, and he is characterized as the sexy protagonist hero of a modern-day rock musical that has been performed on American stages from Broadway to hundreds of colleges and high schools across the nation. In classrooms across the United States, school children study all of the “wonderful” things that Andrew Jackson did to ensure American democracy. Or as David Greenberg claimed, writing for Politico Magazine in summer 2015, Jackson is “the president who made American democracy democratic.”

As a citizen of Cherokee Nation, and as a direct descendant of Cherokee leaders who fought—and won—the right to continued tribal sovereignty in the United States Supreme Court (Wooster v. Georgia), I know all too well the price we pay for celebrating the “legacy” of the only president in United States history to openly defy an order from the Supreme Court. In 1832, just nine years after the Supreme Court declared Indians incapable of claiming legal title to their own land because they constitute “an inferior race” in Johnson v. M’Intosh, Justice Marshall issued a ruling declaring that the State of Georgia could not exercise jurisdiction on Cherokee lands because Cherokee Nation is a sovereign, “distinct community, occupying its own territory” with “the preexisting power of the Nation to govern itself.” Following this victory, my grandfather John Ridge visited President Jackson in the White House. My grandfather asked how the federal government would enforce the Supreme Court’s decision. Andrew Jackson told him, “John Marshall has issued his decision. Let him enforce it.” And with the turn of his hand, Andrew Jackson became the only president in the history of the United States to refuse to enforce an order from the Supreme Court.

Jackson not only defied the Supreme Court—he also violated the plain text of congressional statutes that he himself signed into law. In 1830, Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, the plain language of which required a removal treaty with an Indian Nation before its citizens could be moved. However, as Suzan Shown Harjo points out in her 2015 article for HowlRound, “Andrew Jackson Is Not as Bad as You Think, He’s Far, Far Bloodier,” Jackson never negotiated or signed a removal treaty with the Muscogee Creek Nations; instead, there “was no removal treaty and removal was carried out at bayonet point … Tens of millions of acres were taken illegally, and the Muscogee Peoples still grieve over the displacement, ill treatment, and injustice, and for the homelands and ancestors left behind.”

The substitution of the voice of a Muscogee woman for that of Andrew Jackson in Wings constitutes a significant, and laudable, departure from the traditional American theater cannon. Wings does not offer lengthy exposition, nor does it purport to educate the audience on all of the events in American history that their grade school educators failed to teach them. Instead, Wings offers what nearly all contemporary American theaters refuse to show: an honest, authentic portrayal of an American Indian woman’s journey in the twenty-first century. The fact that Wings’ protagonist happens to be a direct descendant of the people Jackson violently and forcibly removed on a Trail of Tears renders Harjo’s work a powerful contrast to the majority of redface being performed on the American stage today. Harjo’s presentation of story and character is delivered in such an artistic way that, as audience members, we cannot help but gulp in her words breath by breath. With each inhale comes human experience, and with each exhale, we bid farewell to a now useless stereotype.

Harjo’s Wings redefines the American Indian experience from the Andrew Jackson removal era to the boarding school era to today. We now find ourselves fighting to restore the sovereignty of our Tribal Governments, the authenticity of our stories, and ultimately, the right to define our identity. And nowhere is this fight more critical than in the lives of our Indian women. Today, on the American stage, in Hollywood, and in Halloween costume shops across the United States, Native women are portrayed as nothing more than objects to be conquered sexually. From “Pocahottie” costumes to Disney’s Pocahontas, the message is clear: Native women are not to be respected—they are to be exploited.

As a Cherokee woman, and as an attorney, I cannot separate the high rates of violence against our women from the artistic expressions that dominate American society portraying Native women as sexual victims with no agency or power. And we are exploited more so than any other group in the entire United States. Today, reports from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) reveal that Native women are more likely to be battered, raped, or sexually assaulted than any other US population. One in three Native women will be raped in her lifetime, and six in ten will be physically assaulted. On some reservations, the murder rate for Native women is ten times the national average. Native children suffer similar rates of trauma and sexual abuse, as their rates of violent victimization ranks 2.5 times higher than the national average for all other children.

Wings offers an alternative narrative. Redbird’s examination of the violence in her community is inextricably linked to the intergenerational trauma her family has suffered since forced removal. Wings makes clear that violence against Native women in tribal communities is the continuation of a cycle of trauma and grief that began with the Trail of Tears, and, unfortunately, has not yet been allowed to conclude, in large part because we have not been permitted to honestly discuss it on the American stage and in society at large.

In a nation that has instructed Native women to remain silent, Wings signals to Native women that it is permissible for them to publicly share their stories of survival. Through Redbird’s memories, the audience bears witnesses to the violence that erupts from Redbird’s father when he is triggered:

After my mother sang, she and my father fought.

Their friends scattered.

I tried to pull him off her, and he went crazy.

He threw me across the room into the wall.

What happened to the storytelling father? Where did the man go who made my mother laugh? (Wings, 28)

Wings does not shift responsibility away from individual perpetrators of violence against Native women. Instead, Redbird’s story reveals that the perpetuation of this violence is only made possible through the silencing of Native survivors. Currently, the majority of American plays portray violence against Native people as a joke, and as a result, non-Natives have no context in which they have learned to take violence against Native women seriously. And because American culture promotes the sexual commodification of Native women, the violence perpetrated against our women in our own homes is overlooked; in most instances, it simply goes unnoticed. Redbird’s sharing of the violence she and her mother have endured forces the American audience to consider a reality they have been previously told to ignore.

Wings could not come forward for publication at a time more critical in relation to the national movement to restore safety for Native women. Today, the majority of violent assaults committed against American Indians are committed by non-Indians. In fact, a 1999 report from the Bureau of Justice found that “[a]t least 70 percent of the violent victimizations experienced by American Indians are committed by persons not of the same race” (Greenfield and Smith, iv). In cases of sexual assault, research has shown that 67 percent of the perpetrators are non-Native. Thus, although historical trauma has introduced rape to our Native men who now abuse our women, our women are more likely to suffer abuse in the hands of a non-Native—someone who has learned that such abuse will be tolerated as a result of the objectification of Native women he has witnessed in American culture and society at large.

Wings does not shy away from the prevalence of non-Indian violence on Native women and children. Following the departure of Redbird’s biological Muscogee father, Redbird describes the series of suitors who entered their home, desiring her mother, including several non-Indian men who abuse Redbird, her mother, and her siblings:

A preacher dressed in black planned to save us with a lash. He had God on his side. Get down on your knees and pray for the sins of your divorced Indian mother, your Indian father, he hissed behind her back.

We helped our mother push him and his angry God out the door. (31)

In this regard, Wings touches on what has become an epidemic of non-Indian violence perpetrated against Indian women in tribal communities. It is no coincidence that Harjo graduated from Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978. That was the same year the United States Supreme Court decided Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, where they declared that American Indian Nations no longer “have criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians” who commit crimes on tribal lands. The Supreme Court in Oliphant based its decision on an earlier precedent, established in the 1823 case Johnson v. M’Intosh, that “the power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased was inherently lost to the overriding sovereignty of the United States” (Oliphant, 209, quoting Johnson v. M’Intosh, 8).

The Supreme Court in Johnson v. M’Intosh was clear. Indian tribes lost this power to dispose of their own land and could not retain title over their land because the court considered them to be “savages” and “an inferior race of people, without the privileges of citizens, and under the perpetual protection and pupilage of the government.” The court’s decision in 1823 that Indians are racially inferior and savages has never been overturned or declared unconstitutional. Instead, it remains the legal basis for the Supreme Court’s continued denial of tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction to protect Native women today.

Following the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Oliphant, rates of non-Indian violence against Native women skyrocketed. Suddenly, non-Indian men realized they could move onto tribal lands and rape, murder, or abuse Native women, and there was nothing her Tribal Government could do to protect her or prosecute him. Having graduated from Iowa in 1978, Harjo commenced her creative career at a time when the harmful, false narrative of American Indian identity reached its climax—resulting in the legal stripping of our tribes’ inherent right to protect Native women from abuse and sexual violence. In this regard, Wings constitutes a much-needed response to the absence of the voices of Native women, both in the United States Supreme Court and on the American stage.

It is alarming that the same redface performances created to justify the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh remain alive and well on the American stage today. It should come as no surprise, then, that the laws redface helped to shape and create continue to control the lives of American Indians today. For Native women, this reality of redface is devastating.

We know stories are medicine. We know they are healing. We know that when violence is discussed out in the open—and not hidden behind a costume or celebrated in a sexy rock musical—hearts and minds will change. And we know that when hearts and minds change, laws change. And when laws change, lives are saved.

But laws will never change if the stories we tell remain the same. Without a doubt, the United States remains stuck in a nineteenth-century colonial legal framework. What does it mean when, in twenty-first-century America, the United States Supreme Court still classifies our people as “racially inferior”? It means we have to tell our stories. Stories and performances were constructed to allow the Supreme Court to conclude that we are “racially inferior”—stories that continue to find their way to the American stage today. The only way to deconstruct a falsely fabricated prejudicial story is to tell a real one.

Wings is a real story. I do not mean to infer that it is autobiographical, because it is not. Joy Harjo is not Redbird. But Harjo and Redbird are constructed from the same fabric, the same experience, the same survival. Redbird’s stories, her words, her perspective, are all derived from the perspective that playwright Joy Harjo holds as a Muscogee Creek/Cherokee woman. It is a perspective that only a Muscogee Creek/Cherokee woman can know.

Wings offers a healing not only to Native people, but to non-Natives as well. The play itself takes the form of a collective, indigenous ceremony. Indeed, the play’s opening lines welcome the audience to a ceremony: “I welcome you on behalf of the family, and thank you so much for coming out to help with our ceremony” (20).

Redbird clarifies for the non-Native audience that the performance they are about to witness is more than a play; it is ceremony. Ceremony is inherently a collective experience. Healing takes place in ceremony. And in many tribal communities, healing ceremonies involve expressive communications. Grief, shame, despair—a range of emotions may be shared, lessening the burden and trauma for all. Whether in the form of prayer or shared story, the shared communication between community members enables healing. It is no coincidence, then, that after the sharing of the Trail of Tears song, at the front of the play, Redbird announces, “Now, our ceremony begins” (22).

Following the commencement of the ceremony, the testimonials are shared. Redbird shares her story—and at its conclusion, she returns to one of the most fundamental aspects of many Native ceremonies: the giveaway. At the conclusion of Wings, Harjo writes on page 48:

(REDBIRD appears on stage carrying a basket of food and goods.)

Spirit Helper brought me home again to this table. Everything you need for your healing is here, she told me.

The table is within you; it has always been within you. You must remember to acknowledge the gifts. “You must remember to share,” she said. Then she gave me her shawl.

This giveaway is in honor of our ceremony tonight, in honor of all the gifts of struggle of every one of us here.

(Gifts are shared with the audience in this traditional giveaway.)

The giveaway at the conclusion of Wings stands in stark contrast to the culture of mainstream American theater, where audience members come to the theater to give to the artist, and not the other way around. That is, in American theater, audience members pay the artist money and expect to receive nothing in return, except perhaps some entertainment or laughter. In this regard, theater is treated as a commodity.

But in Wings, theater is a gift. The story is a gift. It is a shared experience through which both performer and audience members leave the play with a remarkable benefit. It is a benefit that cannot be quantified in monetary terms, but rather, is made evident in the creation of community and a public space where authentic identity may be expressed, and ultimately accepted.

I never got to see the 2007 workshop of Wings at the Public Theater, but I certainly heard about it. And it inspired me. Suddenly the impossible felt possible. Instead of characters that wear fake feathers and grunt onstage, one of America’s most prestigious theaters had agreed to workshop and present a play that portrays my people, Native people, as human.

Wings offers something true. Something powerful. I hope some non-Native theater companies agree to share it.

WORKS CITED

Elk v. Wilkins. 112. US Supreme Court. 1884. Online.

Greenberg, David. “Keep Andrew Jackson on the $20.” Politico, June 14, 2015. Available at www.politico.com/. Accessed January 5, 2017.

Greenfield, Lawrence A., and Steven K. Smith. United States, Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. American Indians and Crime BJS Statisticians, February 1999, NCJ 173386.

Harjo, Joy. “Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light.” Unpublished. Permission of the author, 2014.

Harjo, Suzan Shown. “Andrew Jackson Is Not as Bad as You Think, He’s Far, Far Bloodier.” Howlround, February 26, 2015. Available at howlround.com/. Accessed December 22, 2016.

Johnson v. M’Intosh. 543. US Supreme Court. 1823. Online.

Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock. 275. US Supreme Court. 1903. Online.

Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. 435. US Supreme Court. 1978. Online.

United States v. Sandoval. 231. US Supreme Court. 1913. Online.

Wooster v. Georgia. 515. US Supreme Court. 1832. Online.