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this is a mixture of my lazy academic reviews and personal moments as a mama going through academia, and it is all my own opinion, and has absolutely no affiliation with anybody else

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Staging Coyote’s Dream Vol. II – Mojica & Knowles

from the publisher: “This second volume of Staging Coyote’s Dream is an all-new anthology of First Nations drama in English that follows up on the success of the first volume. It brings together plays by some of the leading Native playwrights in North America, some of which have not been previously published. Like its predecessor it will be required reading for specialists and students of Native Studies, Native theatre or literature, and will serve as an outstanding introduction for newcomers to the field.”

personal: Okay, a collection of plays. I read two of them previously – Yvette Nolan’s and Pocahontas Blue Spots? – and picked the one by Margo Kane to read fresh. There are ten plays or parts of plays in this, and I’m guessing all deal with transformation. Specifically, in Kane’s play, there is one actor who ‘transforms’ into all the characters and tells the story throughout, and it goes in full circle, and while Ruby may be the lead voice or experience, the Indian Cowboy starts and ends the narrative. It begins with a journey – the idea that we must keep moving, and we’re good at it – so it actually feel slightly upbeat compared to some previous plays I had read. I didn’t agree with the one end line – we are a living treaty – because while the actual premise is true – a living breathing mixture of two cultures – that’s a hugely optimistic and idealistic viewpoint of the reality or intention of the Treaties. It doesn’t take into account the skewed perceptions that altered the effects of the Treaty – one through we were signing over land, we thought we were agreeing to share – and how paternalistic and patriarchal the relationship between Whites and Indigenous people actually is.

quotes:

Introduction

  • “Twenty years later, we are still waiting for the healing to take place, and too often reworking the victim narrative, in which everything that happens is traced back to the poison, to the original wound” (v)
  • There are links, bridges, medicine paths intact that can bridge what is known, or unconsciously known, and bring it into consciousness by performing possible worlds into being. Creation story begins again” (v)
  • “Creation stories are about transformation, metaphors, beginnings” (v)
  • “This collection of plays, together with the first volume of Staging Coyote’s Dream, represents one such set of alliances” (iv)

Confessions of an Indian Cowboy – Margo Kane (p.209)

  • “Times change and you gotta change with ’em. It’s an old story. It’s time to move, time to move on.” (209)
  • “In my favourite picture of her, she wears her deerskin dress with long fringes and her beads and feathers. This was the year she won the Indian Powwow Princess Pageant at home” (210)
  • “But when she finishes her whirlwind tour, she was gallavantin’ off every Friday and Saturday night with her girlfriends. All gussied up, blue eye shadow” (211)
  • “She’s a pretty little filly, tossing her mane and kicking up her heels” (212)
  • “He’s gonna let you down. He’s gonna leave like they all do” (213)
  • “You don’t see the Buffalo fraternizin’ with the Beaver, do you?” (214)
  • “But who is US? And who is THEM? And what are we…. What are we fighting for?” (215)
  • “When Momma died, I remember my sisters going through the house, pulling the doilies and the knick-knacks off the table, chattering and arguing, and tugging at this and that” (218)
  • “It was that way with the buffalo, one minute there were herds and more herds, moving across the land. And the next you had to travel a far ways to find a herd and pretty soon there were no buffalo at all” (219)
  • “Who will remember? Who will remember what was here now that it’s gone?” (220)
  • “You might say, they tuned their fiddle to the cry of the loon and the bellow of the rutting moose” (221)
  • “I am an Indian Cowboy. A living Treaty” (222)
  • “It’s the sharing’ of the journey together that’s gonna make the journey easier” (222)

buy the book: Staging Coyote’s Dream 

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