Years of ‘talking circles’ with tribal members around the country inspired this trilogy of plays

For over a decade now, theater artists Larissa FastHorse and Michael John Garcés have been traveling around the country, meeting with Indigenous communities in what they call “talking circles.”

In Los Angeles, South Dakota and here in Arizona, FastHorse and Garcés invited tribal members to gather and speak frankly about their lives: the cultural issues they were wrestling with, their relationships with their identities and meaningful stories they wanted to see told on stage.

The result is a trilogy of plays: “Urban Rez,” “Wicoun,” and “Native Nation.” FastHorse and Garcés call the trilogy “The Native Nation Project,” and now they’re releasing a book that collects the text of all three plays along with some essays about how they were developed and performed.

The pair joined The Show to discuss how the talking circles shaped their work. When asked for an example of the conversational prompts they used in these sessions, FastHorse said the one thing they often ask is for people to talk about their relationships to their names.

Full conversation

LARISSA FASTHORSE: It's always a very large, sometimes very fraught question. And so I think we've gotten so many interesting ways of looking at how people relate to their Indigeneity today through that.

Like here in California specifically, there are people that are like, "I have this name that was, you know, a Spanish name, and it was for safety because our people were being hunted by the state of California, and they were being paid ... a bounty on the heads of Native people here by the state, given by the state of California."

So Indigenous people were taking on Spanish names to hide themselves, and then trying to reclaim their identity after doing it literally to save their life. It was so incredibly complicated, and ended up with many of those tribes being declared extinct by the federal government in the 1950s.

And they're still fighting to this day to get that declaration reversed.

SAM DINGMAN: I'd be interested to hear from both of you about the creative ethos that underpins the plays that came out of this work, which, Larissa, you have called that ethos, "intentionally incompatible experiences for non-Indigenous audiences."

FASTHORSE: That does sound like me!

DINGMAN: Well, tell me what you mean by that. And Michael, I'd be curious to get your take on what that means to you as well.

FASTHORSE: I mean, I don't think that's the entire central thesis of what we're doing. I think what has risen out of our conversations over many years, Michael and I together saw a way that, in what we're hearing from the community about their incredible erasure, that we could create an experience for non-Indigenous people to feel what it's like to be uncomfortable and feel unwelcome on a space that you thought you were very comfortable on and that you felt very secure in.

And that actually came specifically from the community request to us, which was one of the things we say is, "Where should this play happen? Who should it be for?" And they said, "We want it to be to other people. We need allies. We need help. There aren't enough of us. The government isn't listening. We've been battling with them for decades. We need other people to understand what we're feeling, what we're going through."

Michael and I saw art as a way to create a visceral experience of belonging and then not belonging.

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GARCÉS: There was a way of using space, right? Like we created space in the urban res in a way that people had to really be touching the ground. People were moving. You could not — it was not possible to see all the story. Like, stories happen with a lot of simultaneity. There were different stories happening in different parts of a circle, but we weren't in different rooms.

It wasn't a thing where you were kind of going on a journey and moving through different rooms. We were all in the same space. But not everybody got all of the story. And I think that forced people to deal with a lot of uncertainty as to what was going on.

And then, at the end of the play, we all sort of came together in a circle to see sort of the final few scenes. And then there was a moment where we danced together — it was a circle dance.

And, you know, there's a lot of resistance to "audience participation" among many theater goers, but this was really beyond audience participation. This was really like, you are in this space. This event is happening together.

And the only way that we come out with any kind of feeling of resolution — or even if not resolution, at least the sense of possibility of resolution — is if we do this dance together. And you can choose to participate or not. But that choice really dictates a lot of what you and others walk out of here with.

DINGMAN: In the vein of a lot of these themes and moments that we've been talking about, I wanted to ask you both about a scene from "Native Nation," which is the play in the trilogy that was developed through the talking circles here in Arizona.

There's a number of really fascinating scenes in that piece. One of them is there's this guy named Dennis, who it seems to me that he is asking a sensitive question, says to an Indigenous Marine Corps veteran, "I've never understood how so many of you serve."

And they start talking, and eventually the veteran says, "I was called to protect my land and my people through the path of a warrior. My tribe doesn't have a way to do that anymore. So I looked around and saw that the Marine Corps gave me the opportunity to follow my calling and protect my nation, my sovereign nation."

FASTHORSE: Yeah. I mean, most people don't realize that per capita, Native American people serve in the military at higher numbers than any other racial group in this continent. And that's been true since World War I, when we were not citizens of the United States of America. And we spoke to a lot of military people, and they were very clear on why they served and also very clear on having differing feelings about that.

Like it or not, the occupying nation is occupying our nation. So these are our lands they're defending. These are our people that they're defending and taking care of that we don't have our own individual militaries to do that.

DINGMAN: Yeah.

FASTHORSE: And so we have an endless, confusing and fascinating overlap of governments here in this North American space that we're all reckoning with in so many ways.

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DINGMAN: So far we've been talking a lot about the dynamic of how these communities are or are not legible to audiences outside of these communities. But there's also a lot of exploration of issues that create tension within the communities themselves, like gender. And there is a sequence in "Native Nation" where some characters are discussing how a tribal member who has come out as trans fits — or maybe does not fit — into a traditional ceremony that is very gendered.

GARCÉS: When we did "Native Nation," there was a real sense people talking about things. These are things that we're not talking about enough in our community, or these are tensions in our community and we would like those surfaced in this so people can be inspired to talk about them or to grapple with them overtly.

And the specific complex and fraught circumstance of trans people on tribal lands in Arizona was a big topic of conversation. Our first two performances of "Native Nation" were at the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community. And after the second one, I think it was the lieutenant governor at the time of Salt River stood up and asked to speak, and he spoke.

You know, he started out by saying he was really angry. He said, "I watched the show and I'm really, really angry."

And, you know, of course, for me, I was like, "Oh, no, we totally blew this."

And he said, "I'm angry because we don't talk about these things enough."

It was a very moving moment because I felt like the community members who had participated in all the story circles, and many of whom were also in the cast, some who hadn't participated ... all these people wanted us to have these topics in the play and grappled with — it really made an impact.

That was really the whole point of grappling with those things. Like, Larissa and I are not looking, "Well, let's find the issues that are going to rile people, upset people." We're asking people, "What should be in the play? What should the play talk about?"

And people could say, "We just want a really simple love story and for it to be really sweet," and we would do that, you know what I mean? That would be completely fine.

But it's the themes that sort of rise up that people are consistently saying they want to be in the play that wind up in the play.

DINGMAN: Well, the plays we've been discussing are collected in the new book "Native Nation Project," which came out of the collaboration between my guests, Larissa FastHorse and Michael John Garcés. Thank you both so much for this conversation.

GARCÉS: Thank you.

FASTHORSE: Yeah. We always love talking with you, Sam. Thank you.