Photo by Katherine Fogden, Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian Leila Butts, as August Jackson, hands a bundle of sage to David H. Sawyer, who plays her uncle Craig Robe in the production “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Playwright William S. Yellow Robe Jr. draws a story of adult siblings, descendants of an African-American Civil War cavalryman and a Native woman, who find themselves driven apart by their mixed feelings about their blended heritage.

At its core, “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers” is a love story. It begins with the grandparents, who find love and leave their respective peoples to start a family together, and continues with their modern descendents, who renew their love for each other and themselves.

“Whenever you hear a story about the Buffalo Soldier, it becomes that the Indian woman was raped,” said Yellow Robe, 50.  “There is no conception that these people might have been in love and that they were leaping into new relationships.”

Indian tribes in the West have a complex history with Buffalo Soldiers, who were all-African-American units in the U.S. Army. Tribes gave them the name “buffalo.” But the soldiers were assigned by the U.S. government to subjugate tribes, making them enemies to many. Still, in some instances, Indian women and African-American soldiers married.

For their descendants, prejudice isn’t only historic, as eldest brother Craig Robe explains in the play: “I saw myself through eyes that weren’t mine, then I got on my own and saw myself different.”

Yellow Robe, like his characters, is Assiniboine and also descended from these African-American cavalrymen.

The production is presented by the museum in conjunction with its exhibition, “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.”

“This is an opportunity to provide our audiences with greater insight into the IndiVisible exhibition, and to allow the local African-Native American community to share their story on stage through Bill’s words in the play,” said the museum’s Vincent Scott, who is directing the play.

Scott began reading Yellow Robe’s plays in the early 1990s when Scott was teaching at Fort Peck Community College on the reservation in Northeastern Montana, where the playwright is from. Since then, Scott has wanted to direct Yellow Robe’s work because of its themes of heartache and hope. Now Scott said the museum can bring these stories to the public.

“For myself it is an ongoing process of acceptance; there are moments of good and bad,” said Yellow Robe, who divides his time between writing and teaching literature at University of Maine.

Yellow Robe finds forgiving a necessary part of dealing with history, without forgetting the unique ways his family blended traditional Assiniboine and African-American culture. That synergy gives texture to his life and work like bannock and pork-neck bone, or corn soup and spare ribs, or R. Carlos Nakai and Duke Ellington.

At the museum, the play has inspired sharing among the cast and crew about the universality of knowing and respecting one’s family ancestry, said Scott. He hopes that will resonate with audience members, too.

“Discussions during break times often occur among cast and crew that allow opportunities for company members to share their own experiences of living with mixed heritages or being tribal members,” Scott said.

While the characters in the play confront the different ways in which they have dealt with their mixed-race heritage, there is one character, a young niece, who embraces her whole identity, proudly dancing in regalia, and giving her family hope.

“There are a lot of Native families in Montana who have come up to me and said, ‘That’s our story,’” Yellow Robe said. “The play itself is now reaching communities where people are now facing this reality, because to live in denial is the worst.”

Yellow Robe, who hopes someday to move home again to the Fort Peck Reservation, reflected, “It’s like the old people used to say: We are related to the world.”

View the “IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas” exhibition online at www.americanindian.si.edu/exhibitions/indivisible

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By Kara Briggs
American Indian News Service

Download this article as a Word document.v3i2-theater-play

Photo by Katherine Fogden National Museum of the American Indian Missionary Sybil Bingham, played by Charity Pomeroy, ministers to Hawai’ian Queen Ka'ahumanu (Melonie Leihua Stewart) in the museum’s recent production of “The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu.”

“The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu,” by Native Hawai’ian playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, is the first play to be produced at the museum in Washington using exclusively local acting talent. It explores the powerful, controversial leader’s decision to destroy the male gods of the ruling classes, and later to convert to Christianity. More than 550 people attended the May 15-16 performances, including many from the Native Hawai’ian community in Washington, D.C., joining a discussion with the author afterward.

“I wanted to deconstruct this idea that Native peoples are children who need to be led around, that our chiefs didn’t have the intelligence to have informed choices for themselves,” Kneubuhl said. “When we look back at history we don’t realize how difficult it was.”

Kneubuhl, 60, came to the story of Ka’ahumanu (1768-1832) in the 1980s while working at the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu. As a tour leader and role player in museum dramatizations, she was steeped in the history of Native Hawai’ian women and female missionaries at the time of first contact. Kneubuhl wrote the play in 1988, followed by several other dramas and books.

Courtesy of Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl Playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s “The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu” in May became the first play to be mounted at the National Museum of the American Indian with a local cast and production.

“The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu,” with its all-woman cast and powerful soliloquies, remains her most popular play, having been staged in theaters and universities all over the world. Vincent Scott, a cultural arts program specialist at the National Museum of the American Indian, directed the recent version and documented it on the blog www.nmainativetheater.blogspot.com.

The play exposes collisions of culture, religion and politics, Scott explained. It accomplishes this via discussion among three Native Hawai’ian women and two women missionaries who are building relationships with each other.

“She gives voices to women, whether historical or in a historical context,” Scott said. “She gives them voices that you don’t normally hear in history because history is generally written by men.”

Ka’ahumanu, as a historic figure, is respected for her leadership by some Native Hawai’ians and reviled by others for her religious actions. Kneubuhl leaves open the question of whether Ka’ahumanu’s Christian conversion was really a political move aimed at gaining the status of a Christian nation to the invading Americans.

Melonie Leihua Stewart, who played Ka’ahumanu in the museum’s production, said the queen regent was making difficult decisions at a time when foreign diseases and internal strife left many Hawai’ians dead.

“This play has made me realize how the death of over half of her people in such a short period of time impacted her decision to convert,” Stewart said. “Although there were many other influences, this one particular fact struck me emotionally, and it helped me to provide a stronger delivery on stage.”

Kneubuhl, the playwright and author, said one consequence of Ka’ahumanu’s conversion was that missionaries taught reading and writing to Native Hawai’ians.

“The population became literate very quickly,” Kneubuhl said. “In the 19th century, we see all these Native Hawai’ian newspapers, which lots of elders contributed to. Because they wrote things down, they were preserving things like the Hawai’ian language.”

—Kara Briggs, American Indian News Service