Celebrating The Thanksgiving Play

Nov 26

Seattle has finally produced a play by a Native playwright. This is so exciting. It’s so exciting that I cannot begin unpacking Sicangu Lakota playwright Larissa Fasthorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, produced at Seattle Public Theater, without a bit of background for my excitement. Seattle’s Native theater scene is … underwhelming. The local production company Red Eagle Soaring consistently produces Native youth theater, and the grassroots variety collective Indigenize Productions produces seasonal shows featuring Indigenous performances like “Fierce as F*ck” at venues like Annex Theatre. However, this reviewer has been waiting for Seattle to produce some of the many incredible contemporary Native playwrights such as LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee), Monique Mojica (Kuna and Rappahannock), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Randy Reinholz (Choctaw), Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibwe), Jason Grasl (Blackfoot), Vickie Ramirez (Tuscarora), Dillon Chitto (Mississippi Choctaw, Laguna, Isleta Pueblo), Frank Henry Kaash Katasse (Tlingit), (I could go on), and of course, Fasthorse herself. Two hubs of Native theater in the United States are the Autry Museum’s Native Voices program in Los Angeles and Spiderwoman Theater in New York City, but Portland, Vancouver BC, and even the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, have all demonstrated an active commitment to producing plays by Native and First Nations writers in recent seasons, leaving a notable void in Seattle. Perhaps one reason for this is a perceived lack of Native performers; we rightly want to avoid putting non-Native actors on stage to perform Native roles in this contemporary moment, although some organizations (we’re looking at you, NBC and Saturday Night Live) still don’t understand that. Regardless of the reason, I am hopeful that Seattle Public Theater’s willingness to produce The Thanksgiving Play marks the start of a trend here in Seattle.

Fasthorse is a nationally-acclaimed playwright, and while The Thanksgiving Play is neither her first nor “even her first really good play,” as Sara Keats, Seattle Public’s dramaturg and assistant director notes, it has become one of the top-ten plays produced in 2019. I suspect that it might be the most produced play because the cast is entirely non-Native. Thanksgiving follows four “woke” white educators and actors tasked with responsibly writing and directing the school’s forty-five minute annual Thanksgiving play. These four characters—the yogi and street performer, the ethnically-ambiguous actor, the devoted amateur historian, and the type-A director—grapple with how to create a socially- and historically-responsible play in the complete absence of Native perspectives or knowledges on their committee. In this absence, their efforts predictably unravel, revealing both the difficulty of disentangling the true story of Thanksgiving from the pervasive myth of friendship, peace, and democracy and the limits of white progressive ally-ship. The play’s ninety-minute, single-act structure is broken up into scenes with various YouTube videos of real elementary school Thanksgiving pageants. These seemingly innocent videos depict children in construction paper headdresses singing “This Land is Your Land,” and their juxtaposition with the narrative of the play underscore the way such pageants perpetuate a myth of Thanksgiving that rhetorically and performatively renders Native peoples as primitive and, inevitably, extinct. In the end, the play is a satire about a certain performance of whiteness that provokes liberal non-Native audiences and humors Native ones.

This review analyzes the actual events of the play less and the context for the play’s effectiveness more. For a detailed examination of the play itself I recommend this review. My only quibble with this review is with the writer’s complaint that “it's a 90-minute joke with little to no arc or growth or resolution.” Hardly a meaningless joke, Thanksgiving is full of significant critical engagement with theater’s capacity to intervene in problematic stories about Native peoples and the American mythologies that perpetuate harmful representations of them. Fasthorse’s play relentlessly calls attention to the absence of Native peoples and what non-Native audiences have access to in their absence. This absence is unsettling for progressive whites invested in discourses on allyship and reconciliation and knowing how to fix it all. Native American and Indigenous communities consider such a move “ethnographic refusal.” This term, coined by Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, means that Native people have, and continue to, define the terms of what they share and how they interact with non-Native people. This idea emerges in response to longstanding practices of studying Native peoples, or of making tribal peoples objects of study in order to learn everything possible about them for fear that they were going “extinct.” Simpson argues that Native peoples were never passive actors in the ethnographic process, that they retain narrative agency to share or not share culturally-sensitive information with researchers, and by extension other non-Native voyeuristic endeavors.

Ethnographic refusal is important because it reminds non-Natives that Native peoples have always been active and engaged in their own representation, even as settlers spoke “for” and about them. In The Thanksgiving Play, Fasthorse hooks into this concept through the character of Logan, the anxious director of the play obsessed with finding a Native person who can accurately represent the Thanksgiving story. When she learns that Alicia, the “Native” actress she hired and believed could speak for all Native peoples, is not Native after all, Logan unravels. Logan represents the frustration non-Natives might feel when they are denied access to Native knowledges, but Alicia is not the one denying her this knowledge; Fasthorse refuses to give her white characters that access and lets them struggle in its absence.

In a way, Thanksgiving is a reversal of Ojibwe playwright Drew Hayden Taylor’s 2012 play, White Dead Writer on the Floor, which features four Native stereotype characters and the recently-dead white writer who invented them. The characters—Pocahontas and Squanto among them—have to learn how to live beyond their stereotyped representations in the absence of the white author. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, invites its audience–likely to be white–to confront common stereotypes and limitations of whiteness in the four characters. Fasthorse is generous with each of her characters, similarly granting each the kind of complexity to act beyond the limits of the stereotypes that Taylor grants his Native characters, and allowing them to enact full and complex personalities. Fasthorse’s resistance to trivialize white people expresses a generosity and commitment to relationality that forms part of the groundwork for decolonizing such relationships.

More than simply refuse, or set limits on, access to Native perspectives, Fasthorse flips the gaze away from Native peoples entirely and puts whiteness in her critical crosshairs. In doing so she follows the lead of Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim Tallbear who, in her 2013 book, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, makes “an explicitly ethical move” to turn the focus of her analysis on Native DNA studies away from Native communities and towards “those who are understudied yet influential”: the white researchers (9). Tallbear’s reversed gaze has paved the way for other Native scholars and creatives to do the same. While Fasthorse’s play invites laughter from Native and non-Native audiences alike, the humor for white audiences lies in the discomfort of self-recognition, grounded in satire that applies pressure to white liberal ideas and actions. This humor of recognition for white audiences is, I argue, slightly harder to achieve in an overwhelmingly white progressive city like Seattle, but Fasthorse again refuses to let anyone off the hook. One of the two climatic scenes of the play occurs when Jaxton and Caden, who had been offstage planning their script, return with two decapitated Indian heads and begin playing football with them on stage. The graphic and violent imagery of heads being tossed in sport forces all audiences to see something of the true nature of the violence of Thanksgiving in a deeply visceral way. For Native audiences, this scene is similarly powerful but for different reasons: it is the truth acted out on stage, an affirmation of centuries of violence against Native communities.

The Thanksgiving holiday remains a complex myth in American ideology, and one that requires continued interrogation. More than simply a historical meal shared between the colonizer and colonized in 1621, the historical events behind the myth were violent, and part of broader efforts to remove Native peoples from their home lands. Fasthorse is one of a chorus of American Indian writers and scholars who intervene against the pernicious myth celebrated each November. In his 2018 debut novel, There There, Pulitzer nominee Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho) outlines the early historical encounters between Pilgrims and Native peoples that unsettle the familiar Thanksgiving-table stories of peace and friendship:

“In 1621, colonists invited Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, to a feast after a recent land deal. Massasoit came with ninety of his men. That meal is why we still eat a meal together in November. Celebrate it as a nation. But that one wasn’t a thanksgiving meal. It was a land-deal meal. Two years later there was another, similar meal meant to symbolize eternal friendship. Two hundred Indians dropped dead that night from an unknown poison (4).

In 1637, anywhere from four to seven hundred Pequot gathered for their annual Green Corn Dance. Colonists surrounded their village, set it on fire, and shot any Pequot who tried to escape. The next day the Massachusetts Bay Colony had a feast in celebration, and the governor declared it a day of thanksgiving. Thanksgivings like these happened everywhere, whenever there were what we have to call ‘successful massacres” (5).

The direct brutality in Orange’s descriptions of these histories underscores the way that easily accessible historical facts remain buried under stories of friendly exchange. The Thanksgiving myth perpetuates certain ideals of America as a young nation-state that mask the violence of land dispossession required to establish the nation in the first place.

The national holiday of Thanksgiving was created by President Lincoln, who declared a day of Thanksgiving in October of 1863 in the midst of the darkest period of the Civil War. However, this proclamation of national thanksgiving was made ten months after **President Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in US history, of thirty-eight Dakota men. Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe’s 2019 play, Savage Conversations, critically engages the erasure of this part of the Thanksgiving story and features the ghost of one of the Dakota thirty-eight, as well as the rope that hanged him, and Mary Todd Lincoln. Howe’s innovative storytelling enlivens the haunted legacy of this part of our history.

In March 2019 Abenaki literary scholar Lisa Brooks won the Bancroft Prize for History for her scholarly monograph, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War, which reframes the landscape of these first Indian wars by focusing on different storytellers, such as a female Wampanoag leader and a Nimpuc scholar. Excavating these alternate histories out of the archives produces new insights into the contexts for how settlers and Native peoples interacted.

And just this month Yankton and Standing Rock Sioux historian Philip Deloria published an essay titled “The Invention of Thanksgiving: Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday” in the New Yorker magazine, continuing to complicate the Thanksgiving myth for popular American audiences.

It is so exciting that someone in Seattle has produced a play by a Native playwright. It is crucial that we understand why this is exciting: Native writers and artists have always and continue to use storytelling as a method of resisting disappearance, erasure, and pernicious lies. I intentionally saturated this review with examples of other Native writers and artists engaged in this work: there is so much out there. The examples offered throughout this review are overwhelmingly contemporary and do not account for centuries of narrative and artistic resistance. These examples are also geographically specific to a US-context with some Canadian context and do not account for the vast diversity of storytelling strategies in Indigenous communities across the globe. And, they are literary, and do not account for the legal, political, scientific, and other forms and discourses Indigenous peoples use to resist the myths of colonialism. Larissa Fasthorse and The Thanksgiving Play perform the crucial work of unsettling white audiences and reimagining the representational capacities of theater. Our hope with this review is that it invites the Seattle theater community to learn from people like Fasthorse, and begin the work of bringing more Native stories to the stage.

The Thanksgiving Play

Written by: Larissa Fasthorse (Sicangu Lakota)

Directed by: Kelly Kitchens

Produced by: Seattle Public Theatre

October 18 - November 16, 2019

Review Lead: Lydia Heberling

Review Team: Laura Chrisman, Emily George, Steph Hankinson, Catherine Blake Smith

Works Cited

Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2019.

Deloria, Philip. “The Invention of Thanksgiving: Massacres, myths, and the making of a great November holiday.” New Yorker, 25 November 2019.

Howe, LeAnne. Savage Conversations. Minneapolis, Coffee House Press, 2019. Orange, Tommy. There There. New York, Knopf Books, 2018.

Simpson, Audra. "On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, 'Voice' and Colonial Citizenship." Junctures, 9 Dec. 2007, 67-80.

Tallbear, Kim. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print.

Taylor, Drew Hayden. Dead White Author on the Floor. Vancouver, Talonbooks Press, 2011.