As everywhere in what is currently known as the United States, the Portland metropolitan area sits on land that was home to Indigenous people for thousands of years before settlers arrived from Europe. As it happens, the Portland metro area is also home to the ninth largest population of Native people in the U.S.—an ideal launching place, in many ways, for the inaugural production of The Native Theater Project, Blossom Johnson’s new play, Diné Nishłį (I Am A Sacred Being) or, A Boarding School Play. The play will resonate for the Portland area’s many Native folks—and it also offers the rest of us a too-rare opportunity to sink into and appreciate an experience of Native storytelling, and to move toward solidarity and understanding.
The Native Theater Project seeks to fill an obvious void—but the lack of attention to Native voices in theater is the sort of void to which the dominant culture has grown accustomed, and consequentially the sort of void that it takes extra effort to fill. As Brett Campbell unpacked last week in his ArtsWatch story A new stage for telling Native stories, Project director Jeanette Harrison, who also directed this play, encountered cool reactions from various local theater companies when she sought an artistic home for the Project. But fortunately, she found an enthusiastic partner in Hillsboro’s Bag&Baggage Productions, whose producing artistic director Nik Johnson saw the connections to the company’s other work in the community.
Diné Nishłį opened on September 20 at the Vault in Hillsboro (Bag&Baggage’s home space) but will also be presented at NAYA in Portland and at Portland State University in the coming weeks. It’s a fitting approach to gain exposure for the play and hopefully will expand its audience, an especially important part of the development of new work. This play aims to embody and express subtle wisdom, and such expression stands to benefit especially from the space to breathe and deepen.
The story involves a school for Native students, some of whom live on the school’s campus. That means it’s a boarding school, but not in the sense that used to exist for Native children for hundreds of years continuing well into the 20th century, when the governments of the United States and Canada, often in cooperation with the Catholic Church, sought to strip Native children of their cultural and family connections, regularly abusing and dehumanizing them and conscripting them as laborers.
Those “residential schools” were a prominent aspect of genocidal practice that lives in the collective psyche of Native people to this day—and though the school in this play appears to operate with different aims under the benevolent leadership of the beloved Ms. B (Lori Tapahonso, a citizen of the Navajo Nation who also served as the production’s language and cultural consultant), the play exposes ways in which that history continues to impact the students and their teachers.
Four residential students are at the center of the play—teenage girls Rosie (Taya Dixon; Siletz-Alsea, Tututni, Chetco, and Sixes), Jolene (Cassie Funmaker; Ho-Chunk), Kaylene (Aurora Hernandez; Navajo/Indigenous), and Shawna (Dominique Knight; Lumbee). The play offers us a window into their dreams for themselves, their competitions and crushes and crises of confidence and fears, and also their little rebellions against a newer teacher, Ms. K (Laura John, Blackfeet/Seneca), who has not succeeded in convincing them of the value of teaching them dominant-culture table etiquette and whose focus on cleaning and discipline they resent.
It becomes clear that ghosts are haunting this repurposed boarding school. Some may be actual ghosts—at least some of the play’s characters believe so—but other sorts of ghosts haunt in ways that are perhaps more troubling. Ms. K seems at times to be playing out internalized messages that Native children are defective and need to be molded to fit and satisfy the dominant culture. Ms. B has more consciously replaced such goals with reinforcement of the children’s sacredness, yet is increasingly plagued by moments of disorientation. Though the characters describe her problem as dementia, one wonders if a more accurate description would account better for the remnants of harm she carries in her body.
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Diné playwright Johnson brings complexity into this telling, sprinkling more conventional action with moments for each girl to speak from her inner life, and injecting a variety of spiritual perspectives without attempting to solve or reconcile them. The play imparts glimmers of the challenges of recovering or building a sense of one’s self in the wake of genocidal practice that has not wholly died out; of existing in the present when reconciliation with the past remains challenging. The two teachers convey the struggles to lead when one’s own wounds remain unhealed, and how easy it can be to retain detritus of harm one means to resist. Blanca Forzán’s lighting, costumes by Racquel Toni Begaye, and scenic design by Tyler Buswell bring us into liminal space, guided by Ms. B’s moments of lightly held wisdom.
The cast of young women bring energy and hunger to their portrayals; the play is never better than when they are singing, their voices reaching for connection to desperately needed wisdom beyond themselves. The opportunity to hear dialogue interspersed with Navajo language deepens the experience, reinforcing an important aspect of connection to legacy and to sacredness; we witness how that effort to articulate in Navajo challenges and inspires the girls.
The bone structure of this play holds wisdom beyond much new work, and one can hope that under the leadership of director Harrison, this production will deepen and attract enough interest to inspire further productions. There is work to build on here, and Portland area audiences should grab the chance to participate as audience members in one of the production’s three venues.
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Diné Nishłį continues through Sept. 29 at The Vault in Hillsboro and then will play Oct 4-6 at the Native American Youth & Family Center (NAYA) in Portland, and Oct. 10-13 at Portland State University’s Native American Student and Community Center.
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