When Jeanette Harrison was deciding what to do after parting ways with Portland’s troubled Artists Repertory Theatre, she could choose among several different directions:

— Return to California’s Bay Area, where she’d founded and run San Rafael’s AlterTheater before being brought to Portland by ART?

— Continue directing, writing and producing in national theater and film productions, most recently as associate director to Rachel Chavkin on the 2023 Broadway production of her longtime collaborator Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play?

— Double down on her work in arts education such as the Arts Learning Project she’d helped create, which helps provide accessible arts education to Native students across the nation?

Whichever path she chose, Harrison had a wide range of experience and achievement to offer. Oh, and she had one other important asset: a $200,000 grant from the NoVo Foundation.

This fall marks the debut of Harrison’s Native Theater Project, hosted by Hillsboro’s Bag&Baggage Productions. The new company aims to “celebrate Native voices by producing Native stories by Native artists, supporting storytelling sovereignty, developing Native leaders, and enhancing the cultural competency of the American theatre ecosystem,” according to its press release.

NTP’s first show, Diné Nishłį (I Am A Sacred Being) or, A Boarding School Play by playwright Blossom Johnson, opens Friday, Sept. 20, at B&B’s home base, The Vault Theatre & Event Space on Hillsboro’s Main Street, before traveling next month to Northeast Portland’s Native American Youth & Family Center (NAYA) and Portland State University’s Native American Student and Community Center.

Directed by Harrison, the play chronicles the adventures of four Navajo girls at a Native prep school as they prepare traditional songs and dance for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah. It’s a story that resonates with both Native and non-Native audiences, Harrison says: “We’re telling stories for Native people, and also sharing them with wider audiences.”

Cultural Erasure 

Certainly American theater needs more Native artists. Despite a few recent high-profile movies, a recent UCLA study “examined media content from 2018-2019 and found Native representation to be between 0.3%–0.5% in film,” according to an Associated Press story. “In television or on stage, Native representation was virtually nonexistent,” in a country where almost 10 million Americans — nearly 3 percent of the population — claim some Indigenous heritage. 

Even on the rare occasions Native American stories or artists appeared onstage, those representations were too often compromised by cultural incompetence, Harrison says: “I can’t tell you how many times a designer has brought in something to put onstage that comes from 2,000 miles away, with completely different aesthetics and tradition. You wouldn’t do that for anyone else. When we talk about cultural competency, we mean making sure those stage representations accurately reflect the appropriate culture.”

One huge barrier to Native participation in American theater: money. “After George Floyd’s murder, there was a reckoning across the country that swept theater as well,” Harrison says. “One of the inequities highlighted as part of that was how little Native theater artists get paid compared to other artists. That simply has to change — full stop.

“One of the ways a playwright makes a career is multiple productions of every play. The tragic reality of Native plays is that they tend to get produced once, maybe twice, maybe three times. It took Larissa [FastHorse] many years before she was making money not from commissions but from productions. So the way we need to change the economics of theater for Native writers is simple: More theaters need to produce Native playwrights. Period.”

Still, despite all the barriers to entry, the country is experiencing a welcome upsurge in original theater by Native American playwrights, many of whom Harrison had worked with. The time seems ripe for a theater company that could leverage and even build on that foundation to produce more work by, for, and involving Native theater artists, at least proportional to their presence in the population. “Raising visibility with Native stories, sharing who we are in our own words is so vital.” Harrison says.

That’s why Harrison had pitched the idea of a Native theater development program, led by Native people, to NoVo, which already funded her arts education program. Yet when she got the good news about the $200,000 grant funding (subject to finding a nonprofit organization as “fiscal sponsor”), and called a few Portland-area theaters, cash figuratively in hand, asking them to consider partnering with the project, she found unexpectedly cool or hesitant initial reactions. With one shining exception.

Finding a Home in Hillsboro

Harrison had met Nik Whitcomb a couple of years ago, over coffee at a conference in New York shortly after both had been hired by their respective Oregon theater companies. 

“Within five minutes of meeting each other, Nik and I were talking about deep issues around what our field truly needs to support artists in telling stories that are authentic to not just them as individual artists but to their families, their communities,” Harrison recalled in a statement. “Our synergy and goals align beautifully.” 

They stayed in touch, and when ART canceled its season and laid off its staff, “I reached out and asked her, how can I help, what can I do?” Whitcomb says. “We talked about the kind of work she wanted to do. Her vision aligned with my own personal interest in telling new stories and uplifting new voices. I thought Bag & Baggage could be useful.”

Not only did B&B own a splendid venue in The Vault, the company also boasted the basic production infrastructure such as ticketing and marketing operations, contract and payment systems. And it already had the crucial 501(c)3 tax status required for the grant funding. A partnership was born.

It wasn’t just Bag&Baggage that made Harrison feel welcome. Even though she still lives in North Portland, the company’s demographically diverse hometown has also embraced her work. 

“I have had such a warm reception in Hillsboro,” she says. “In some ways, Hillsboro reminds me of San Rafael,” her previous company’s home. “It’s just outside a large city, but far enough away that it feels like its own community. They’re both full of mom-and-pop shops and people who own their own businesses.”

Other organizations have also stepped up. The social justice organization Unite Oregon, for example, reached out to help distribute tickets to activists in Washington county’s Native communities. “What’s been amazing about starting this project is how many people have showed up to support us,” Harrison says.

Intertwined Experiences

Harrison didn’t always intend to create a Native theater company. It just turned out that the variegated components of her quarter-century-long career journey uniquely equipped her to do so. 

“I keep ending up at these crossroads of my life where I have this odd combination of skills that make me qualified to do things I would have never thought of doing,” she explains.

She’s also learned from a number of other American companies — in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York and elsewhere — that are doing what she calls “amazing work.” But none can offer the particular combination of services Harrison aims to provide with NTP, including artist and play development, education, production, and more.

For instance, Harrison also runs a summer theater camp for Native youth at Portland State University, and NTP will also host Free Write 40, a weekly virtual space that gives Native writers time to write, share drafts, and receive feedback. Writing cohorts work together for eight weeks, studying leadership development and Native wellness initiatives. 

“I think the beauty of everything I’m doing now is that it’s all intertwined,” she said, such as involving some of her summer camp students in upcoming NTP productions, and securing NTP performances at Portland State thanks in part to the relationship she’d built with the university when it hosted her Native youth camp. 

“It’s about parlaying the unique experiences I have had, including working on Broadway, working in leadership positions in some of our largest theaters, to try to move more Native artists and Native stories onto those stages, and finding ways for Native youth to have connections to professional working Native artists and to have pathways into a career in the arts.” 

Harrison, who descends from Onondaga Nation ancestry (part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois or the Six Nation Confederacy), estimates that about a third of her theater career had involved Native American work. NTP allows her to concentrate entirely on that aspect of theater. “Now I’m in a position to focus in on these different programs, amplify them and spread them to different platforms, so that ultimately, we can improve the lives of Native people and strengthen Native communities,” she says. 

Even her truncated tenure with ART unintentionally put Harrison in just the right place to start something new and different. “Ending up in Portland turned out to be exactly where I needed to be,” she says. “This is the 22^nd largest media market but has the 9^th largest Native population. So many existing arts organizations serve Native people. Some have arts programming built in — but not theater. So it’s going be easy to encourage the Native artists who are already here to add theater into their portfolio, and bring Native artists back to theater.” 

Staging Native Stories

One of those artists is Blossom Johnson, a Diné playwright, screenwriter and dramaturg from Dził Yijiin, Arizona who’d been a runner-up for a prestigious Yale indigenous playwriting contest. “Her play was lovely and challenging and emotionally honest and poetic,” Harrison recalls, and she invited the Navajo Nation playwright to participate in the 2020-21 edition of the Native playwright residency she ran.

“The provocation of that residency was to take a creative risk with your work,” Harrison explains. “Blossom was experimenting with using theater as a tool for language revitalization.”

With an MFA in dramaturgy from Columbia University, Johnson is “perfectly aware of theatrical forms,” Harrison says. “She knows how to use them, break them or ignore them. I feel like her writing is some of the most unapologetically Indigenous writing that I’ve had the pleasure of reading. There are artists who help define a new way of working, and I think Blossom is that generational talent who is crafting that new form of theater.”

During that residency, “I was present when these four girls (the protagonists of Diné Nishłį) first showed up on paper, and I instantly fell in love with them,” Harrison remembers. As the play progressed through many iterations during the workshop, “every time we’d see more and more of them and we all fell deeper in love with these girls.”

The story follows that high school quartet from the moment their song and dance group is invited to sing the Navajo National Anthem at the 2002 Winter Olympics through complications that ensue when a teacher thinks one of them left her a threatening voicemail, forcing them to concoct a plan to save their journey. “Exuberant, sunny, and just a little bit haunted, this comedy celebrates the dreams, hopes, and confidence of young Native women as they each find their own way to honor their cultural traditions and live their dreams in a modern world,” says the press release.

Johnson describes the setting as “an early 2000s punk rock goth vibe, with all that hair and makeup and regrettable fashion trends. But the punk rock goth armor does not swallow them. They break and indigenize.” 

Yet for all its cultural and temporal specificity, Diné Nishłį tells a universal story that anyone can feel, Harrison says: “Have you ever been a teenager, had dreams for your future, had self-doubt that you can ever realize your dreams? Then you can relate to this story.”

The all-Oregon-based Native cast and other artists will tour the show to “predominantly white spaces and Native spaces and mixed community spaces,” Harrison says. “You have the opportunity to see it wherever you want to.”

Collaboration & Incubation

Both Harrison and Whitcomb hope that their new partnership can model ways of facilitating more Native theater. After encountering indifference elsewhere — “there’s so much gatekeeping, hoarding of resources” in the theater world, she says — Harrison found Whitcomb’s trademark immediate enthusiasm “a breath of fresh air,” she says. “One of the things that excites me about a theater ecosystem is a spirit of generosity and cooperation, and Nik embodies that in his bones.”

During her years of making theater in the San Francisco Bay Area, several companies cooperated by sharing props, costumes, even a warehouse to store them. “That’s the kind of environment I thrive in and want to be contributing to,” she says, “so I love the idea of collaborating with Nik to create something bigger than either of us could do on our own. He’s kind and generous and ethical — somebody you can just trust.”

Whitcomb in turn admires Harrison’s “ability and desire to uplift and bring out the best in others,” he says. “That’s an important part of leadership that folks often forget. It’s not just wanting to be in control but also empowering others to be bold and make decisions.” Part of the NTP/B&B partnership includes “modeling a way to produce Native work that puts Native people in leadership positions, and gives them a platform to reach wider audiences,” Harrison says. 

Whitcomb also values Harrison’s ability to execute on a vision: “Jeanette is always generating the ideas to keep things moving forward. So often people can have an excellent idea, but actually codifying what it looks like and finding a way to move towards it is a more challenging piece of program management that people don’t often think of.”

NTP is technically a program of B&B, which acts as its “fiscal sponsor” and provides essential resources, everything from email addresses to technical facilities to a “brain trust” of B&B administrative staff and resident artists to folding its productions into B&B’s next season. The artists working on NTP shows are technically B&B artists.

 “We’re still figuring out exactly where NTP sits within Bag&Baggage’s organization, and how do two organizations live under the same roof?,” Whitcomb explains. “What we shouldn’t be touching is anything that’s culturally specific. We’re trying to build an organizational infrastructure so they’re supported by the staff, but also allows NTP to make their own decisions. It’s a fun balancing act!”

Whitcomb, a born collaborator, hopes that whatever arrangement they wind up with can be a model for other collaborative theater ventures. However, he views the relationship with NTP as slightly different from his previous (and ongoing) collaboration with the new Hillsboro Film Festival, which B&B co-produces once a year with a local video production company. 

“With NTP, we’re more like an incubator,” he says. “The film festival will always be at The Vault, and NTP will be housed here for a bit (through 2026 under current plans) and will eventually grow its own wings.” 

After this debut production, NTP’s leadership training, education and FreeWrite residency will continue, with the hope that some of those participants can work in future productions, including a new one coming in 2025-26. “A lot depends on the funding we can bring in to codify the commissioning program, the leadership program, and the rest,” Harrison says. “I’ll be exploring what capacity can we hopefully build at Bag & Baggage to sustain Native Theater Project after its incubation.”

That vision doesn’t include NTP owning its own building, with all the managerial and fundraising challenges that brings (as evidenced by the struggles of her previous Portland company). Instead, “I would rather partner with other organizations for a space,” Harrison says. “With a lot of theater spaces, for a lot of Native audiences, we don’t feel invited into them, and they’re not for us. We want to make sure we can bring our work where our people are, where they feel comfortable. My dream is to eventually have enough resources to not just tour around Portland but to Native places across the state.”

For now, though, Harrison is thrilled to be incubating NTP at Bag&Baggage. She says the B&B board of directors even launched its own fundraising campaign to make sure they could support the new venture as it got off the ground. “That’s the kind of place I want to be creating theater — in a community that includes us all. I get to do the fun stuff, and Bag & Baggage does the rest! I can’t imagine having a better partner for Native Theater Project.“

***

“Diné Nishłį” schedule

Native Theater Project’s production of Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being), or A Boarding School Play runs in several locations:

• September 19-29, 2024 at The Vault Theater & Event Space, 350 East Main Street, Hillsboro.
• October 4-6 at Native American Youth & Family Center (NAYA), 5135 N.E. Columbia Blvd., Portland.
• October 10-13, PSU Native American Student and Community Center, 710 S.W. Jackson St., Portland. 

Read more stories about Hillsboro arts.