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    Tombs of the Vanishing Indian
    Tombs of the Vanishing Indian
    Tombs of the Vanishing Indian
    Ebook109 pages50 minutes

    Tombs of the Vanishing Indian

    By Marie Clements

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    Three Young Native American sisters and their mother board a bus bound for Los Angeles, leaving home as part of a 1950s government mandate to relocate reserve Indians to urban centres. This assimilationist policy was one focus of Métis playwright Marie Clements’s research when she was commissioned to create a new play for the tenth anniversary of the Native Voices series at the Autry National Center, Los Angeles.

    Clements dramatizes the emotional, psychological and social repercussions of this, and subsequent, bureaucratic incursions into the girls’ lives. Their arrival in California takes a tragic turn when their mother is suddenly killed and the girls are arbitrarily placed in different foster homes, never to see each other again.

    We follow Janey, Miranda and Jessie as they lead very disparate adult lives: Janey, a troubled vagrant; Miranda, a burgeoning actress fighting typecasting in Hollywood; Jessie, an idealist physician who’s married to a medical colleague. As it was bureaucratic policy that had dismantled their secure family unit and sent each girl into the unknown, so too did a government paper ultimately bring them together, if only symbolically. Clements casts the sisters’ narrative against the backdrop of another historical injustice: the forced sterilization of thousands of Native women in the 1970s, a practice that was only abolished in 1981.

    Clements’s play is a compelling, and poetic, investigation of the coldly bureaucratic machinations that have, throughout history, attempted to facilitate the disappearance of Native people. Though Tombs of the Vanishing Indian focuses on specific policies and locations, it speaks eloquently to broader themes of Aboriginal displacement. There are, indeed, echoes of Canadian policy aimed at the dissolution of First Nations families and culture: the potlatch ban, residential schools and the ban on Native language, whose profoundly damaging ramifications are our shared legacy.

    Cast of 4 women and 3 men.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTalonbooks
    Release dateApr 15, 2012
    ISBN9780889227132
    Tombs of the Vanishing Indian
    Author

    Marie Clements

    Marie Clements is an award-winning Métis performer, playwright, and director whose work has been presented on stages across Canada, the United States, and Europe. She is the founder of urban ink productions, a Vancouver-based First Nations production company that creates, develops and produces Aboriginal and multi-cultural works of theatre, dance, music, film and video. Clements was invited to the prestigious Festival de Theatre des Ameriques in 2001 for Urban Tattoo and in 2002 for Burning Vision. In 2002, she worked in the writing department of the television series Da Vinci’s Inquest. A fellowship award from the BC Film Commission enabled her to develop the film adaptation of her stage play, The Unnatural and Accidental Women. She is also a regular contributor on CBC Radio. Clements writes, or, perhaps more accurately, composes, with an urbane, incisive and sophisticated intellect; her refined artistry is deeply rooted in the particulars of her place, time and history. The world premiere of Copper Thunderbird is the first time Canada’s National Arts Centre has produced the work of a First Nations playwright on its main stage.

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      Book preview

      Tombs of the Vanishing Indian - Marie Clements

      9780889226869_cvi_fmt.jpg9780889226869-tp.jpg

      PRODUCTION HISTORY

      Tombs of the Vanishing Indian was commissioned to mark the tenth anniversary of the Native Voices series at the Autry National Center and the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles. Given an extended research and writer’s retreat and workshop at Native Voices in 2004 and 2005, Tombs of the Vanishing Indian was presented as a staged reading in November 2005 at Live at the Autry in Los Angeles.

      Additional staged readings were performed at La Jolla Playhouse on Saturday, June 5, and at the Autry National Center on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

      Director: Seema Sueko

      Dramaturg: Brian Quirt

      Tombs of the Vanishing Indian was first performed in a Native Earth Performing Arts and red diva projects co-production at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto from March 9 to March 27, 2011.

      JESSIE: Nicole Joy-Fraser

      MIRANDA: Falen Johnson

      JANEY: PJ Prudat

      THE MOTHER / The Lone Woman / Ruth / Sarah:

      Michelle St. John

      DR. DANIEL HANSEN / BLACKCOAT THREE:

      Keith Barker

      BOB STILLS / BLACKCOAT TWO / WHITE INTERN ONE:

      David Storch

      DETECTIVE FULLEN / BLACKCOAT ONE / WHITE INTERN TWO: Martin Julien

      Director: Yvette Nolan

      Set Design: Jackie Chau

      Composer: Jennifer Kreisberg

      Gabrielino Translation and Language Coach: Virginia Carmelo

      INTRODUCTION

      Tombs of the Vanishing Indian is a work on the cusp. It balances on edges keener than a straight razor and, like the imagery of water and tears the play paints, it rushes at us in a torrent. It is at its inception already a canonical work.

      Tombs of the Vanishing Indian lives in between spaces, between our intellect and our emotions, working its way past our constructs and reasoning deeply into our bones. It is a play that upon first reading already insinuates itself along the pathways of our nerves, as it drives itself relentlessly towards the harrowing conclusions that its characters must inevitably face. There is no place for us to escape its breakneck velocity. In its first scene, this dominant theme emerges − flight. Characters running for their lives. The sound of feet running from certain danger. Flashlights. Darkness. And blood mixed with water.

      Just as in her earlier work, playwright Marie Clements carves theatrical space to her will. Three sisters. Three spaces. Three glass rooms. Dioramas. Glass cages. Clements, like a surgeon, opens American history unflinchingly. In the life of one family, we see the displacement of communities, the legacy of Indian boarding schools and missions, and finally the forced sterilization programs run by the Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1950s and 1970s. Andrea Smith, in her 2005 book Conquest, examines this attack on women and the government’s use of sexual violence as a tool of genocide. Native women were targeted precisely because their ability to reproduce continued to [stand] in the way of the [ongoing] conquest of Native lands (p. 79). In her use of theatrical space, Clements helps us understand that these women’s bodies − these vital spaces − are in fact another battlefront for the continuing wars of Manifest Destiny and control.

      From the pages of Tombs of the Vanishing Indian, the land literally leaps out at the reader, guiding us into knowledge and situating us not so much in a darkened theatre in a northern city but in the deserts of the West. Commissioned in 2003 by Native Voices at the Autry and developed in association with them at the Native Voices at the Autry Playwrights Retreat in Los Angeles in 2004 and 2005, the work is an extension of that community and its sun-drenched landscapes.

      Even the language of the land emerges rightfully in Clements’s writing. The Gabrielino dialect, brought powerfully into play by the ghost of the three sisters’ mother, evokes much more than the culture from which the daughters were taken. It becomes the music of the play, a threnody for an entire generation. But it is easy to look at this use of language in terms of loss of culture − which of the sisters learn it, speak it, once they are cut away from the source? In Tombs of the Vanishing Indian, the use of Gabrielino is far more complex. Again, it is one of the means the playwright uses to slip into the in-between spaces of her characters’ lives, into the spaces Clements always leaves for her actors to discover. Gabrielino, in the scenes with Detective Fullen, in particular, becomes a shield which The Mother’s ghost uses to protect the daughters from the deafening crash of cultures. The Mother says, Keep me inside of you. The language is what is inside

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