In Seattle, the Duwamish Tribe developed an innovative dinner theater project to raise public awareness of the tribe’s history and current-day struggles, and to promote the cultural, social, political and economic survival of Seattle’s First People. The project also seeks to raise funds for a Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center, and to regain tribal recognition by the US federal government. The Duwamish have been fighting for federal recognition for over 25 years — in the wake of a much deeper history of injustice.
The city of Seattle is named for the Duwamish leader, Si'ahl, who helped immigrants from Europe to get established after they landed in what is now West Seattle in 1851. White settlers later forced the Duwamish off the land and burned their longhouses and potlatch houses to the ground, beginning a legacy of brutal oppression that would continue for more than 150 years.
Most recently, the Duwamish were granted federal recognition on the final day of the Clinton Administration in early 2001, only to have it overturned later that year by the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs under the Bush Administration. In the absence of recognition, funding, and human services, the Duwamish Tribe has struggled to provide critical social, educational, health, and cultural programs to its people. The Tribe currently has around 600 enrolled members, and many more who have Duwamish ancestry but who have chosen to enroll with federally recognized tribes in order to obtain health and other human services.
The theater project is a partnership between the tribe, the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), local Native American actor and storyteller Gene Tagaban, and Native American ceramic artist Doe Stahr. The original idea was to provide a dinner theater experience where people would share a traditional salmon dinner on ceramic dinnerware featuring authentic Duwamish patterns and designs, while witnessing compelling performances by Tagaban illustrating the true history, identity, and experiences of the Duwamish people. Pottery would be on sale with proceeds benefiting the Duwamish Tribe. Initial performances met with great success, raising $2,500 from pottery sales in a single night. However, the Tribe recently decided to shift course and move from a smaller dinner theater space into a larger venue in the MOHAI auditorium, which holds almost 400 people.
“We feel good about the modifications,” said Chad Lewis, chair of the Tribe’s capital campaign committee. “The Social Justice Fund grant made a tremendous difference. We were really at a point in time where without some leverage we would not have been able to put the new plans together with MOHAI, which I expect will pay the bills next year.”
Down in Woodburn, OR, Voz Hispana Causa Chavista, a Latino organization founded on the values of legendary farmworker rights organizer Cesar Chavez, works to build political power in the local Latino community through leadership development and new voter organizing. Voz Hispana used its Cultural Grant to contract with Teatro Milagro, a Portland-based Latino theater group, to do an after-school camp in the Woodburn School District. The project is called Teatro Juvenil, and has so far attracted about 15 youth, mostly immigrants, ranging from 14 to 17 years old, who learned how to read plays, to develop scripts based on their own lives and experiences, and to perform them in public.
“The youth learned how to take an issue and develop it into an action campaign using theater,” said Voz Hispana’s Coordinator, Bartolo Marquez. “They had to ask, ‘How do we present this issue to the community?’ …They created a performance for the Cesar Chavez celebration, about Cesar Chavez and the impacts of pesticides on individual farmworkers, and combined that with the issue of standing up for your rights.”
The performance drew over 200 people, including teachers at the local high school, who felt that seeing the youth express themselves through acting and singing was the best part of the program. Marquez explained that some of the youth had only arrived from Mexico in the previous month, and some had been in Woodburn for a while longer, which generated some creative tension in the group: “Even though they are all Latino, we saw the engagement of youth from two different cultures, you could say. They’ve had different experiences growing up.”
Overall the project has had a positive impact both on the youth and in the community. However, Marquez said that the project has plenty more work waiting in the wings. “We will take up the task of leadership development and political education in September, and look at the issues that youth are really dealing with, and put them into action.”
Nearby in Portland, the Western Prison Project is using theater as a way to surface and address issues of violence and racism. The Forum Theater Project for Violence Intervention has gone directly into communities affected by violence and by racism in the criminal justice system, and worked with them to develop a script based on the real-life experiences of individuals and families. The project partnered with Act for Action - Theater for All, an organization dedicated to the use of theater for education and social justice.
“We have 15 actors, with the overwhelming majority being people of color,” said Terrie Quinteros, Director of the Crime Survivors for Community Safety program at the Western Prison Project. “We had an explicit emphasis on having a people of color-led process from the start — with people of color actors in main character roles, and truly representing communities in Portland who have had the hardest time with the police, and who also have the greatest fear of police, given the number of African Americans and Latinos who have been killed by the police in the last 10 to 15 years.”
Quinteros worked with Act for Action’s Director Jeannie LaFrance to hold two free, open-call community workshops to talk about violence through theater exercises, and to lead people through non-threatening ways of expressing how they had either experienced or witnessed violence in their lives. There were numerous stories of family, workplace, personal, and institutional violence based on race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and economic status. These stories, and how they were expressed through writing and theater exercises, informed a script that will be performed in September and October.
“We asked people to write about their experiences, and when there was an unhelpful response from family, friends, the police, social service organizations, etc.,” Quinteros explained. “We wanted them to write about what was not helpful about their response — what was it you were looking for, what did you want, and what did they give you? …It’s a really safe way of expressing some intense emotions, and it’s cheaper than therapy. There’s a lot of laughter, and exercises we do to help people let go of their inhibitions.”
Quinteros says she believes the project will have a lasting impact on the Western Prison Project’s work. “My general sense is that this is something that is so different from anything we’ve ever done before as an organization. Just as we’re constantly asking the actors to let go of their inhibitions, we have to do the same.”
She explained that during the last Oregon Legislative session, there was an extremely punitive gang bill introduced, which luckily failed. It would have mandated enhanced sentences for suspected gang members, those who were in a crowd of more than three people wearing similar clothes, or who were identified as gang members by the police. Quinteros says the Western Prison Project is planning some creative actions to take when the bill comes up again next year.
“We have already talked about doing another much shorter theater piece on the steps of the capitol with young people, having them show what their lives are like, that just because you follow a fashion trend you’re not a gang member,” she said. “People were right on it, and I just don’t think that would have happened at this organization a year ago.”