An open letter about the premiere of
Bloody Bloody
Andrew Jackson in Minneapolis from Rhiana Yazzie
RHIANA YAZZIE
EDITOR'S NOTE: Co-produced with the Hennepin
Theatre Trust, Minneapolis Musical Theatre ran Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson from June 6 – June 29, 2014 at the New
Century Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since then, all evidence for the
support of this rock musical has disappeared from Hennepin
Theatre Trust's website. No apology was ever issued. Although the object
of its address has now passed, we feel that this open letter is still a
poignant piece of resistance writing and in the context of the 2016 U.S.
presidential election, where Donald Trump is touted as the "New Andrew
Jackson" we believe it is timely as well. (AC)
Does
Minnesota know itself well enough to responsibly produce a show like Bloody Bloody
Andrew Jackson? The title makes the play sound like a fun, maybe even gory,
critique of our seventh president, about whom most Americans have heard
contradictory ideas. Whether or not we've investigated the subject, it sounds
like attending this play will likely cast a clearer light on a shadowy part of
American history, one that might include a critique of the spectacular violence
waged from 1829–1837 by the slaveholding president dubbed Old Hickory.
Maybe Bloody Bloody
will take Andrew Jackson's campaign of ethnic cleansing head on? Maybe it
will acknowledge the thousands of Native Americans he killed. As a Native
American, a playwright,
a
musical theatre fan, and artistic director of New Native Theatre, I say right
on. What a wonderful opportunity and contribution to American theatre to see a
play responsibly take up these important issues, issues that have determined
Native American inclusion and access. We need as many advocates in the media as
we can get. But that's not what happens, instead this script, written by J.
Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers reinforces stereotypes and leaves me
assaulted, manipulated and devastatingly used as a means to a weak and codependent end.
On June 6th, 2014, Minneapolis Musical Theatre opens Bloody Bloody
Andrew Jackson, a co-production with the Hennepin
Theatre Trust. It's taken four years for any company in the Twin Cities to
approach this offensive play since it debuted in New York in 2010. Could it be
because in Minnesota we have a relationship with Native Americans and their experience
collectively embraced? Could it be that we know our history, the legacy of the
vicious founding of this state, and its violent dealings with Native Americans?
Could it also be because Minneapolis is home to the founding of the American
Indian Movement? Could it be for these reasons we can see that the play is an
exercise in racial slurs against Native Americans justified with a thin coating
of white shaming? Why would we together be bothered with it then?
But soon it will be performed and the character Andrew
Jackson written by Alex Timbers and J. Michael Freedman will spew unchallenged
racial epithets five times a week on soil that is still yet recovering from our
own troubled history. Soil where blood has been spilled and land has been taken
and people have been shoved aside. There is nothing about this history that is
"all sexy pants," to quote the marketing machine that accompanied this show.
The truth is that Andrew Jackson was not a rockstar
and his campaign against tribal people—known so briefly in American
history textbooks as the "Indian Removal Act" is not a farcical backdrop to
some emotive, brooding celebrity. Can you imagine a show wherein Hitler was
portrayed as a justified, sexy rockstar? This play
exacerbates the already deficient knowledge our country has when it comes to
Native history; in that context, a false story about this country and our
engagement with Native American people is unforgivable.
I saw this play when it debuted at the Public Theater in New York in 2010 and was invited to speak with
the authors among a group of other Native American artists to openly discuss
the play's inaccurate history and depiction of Native Americans. It was dubbed
as an emo rock musical paralleling George W. Bush's
rise to power and the following Tea Party movement.
I can list specifically the ways that the play
distorts history, but that would take pages. Instead I'll look at a few key
moments such as the inciting incident where Andrew Jackson's parents are killed
by Indians who shoot random arrows into the young Jackson's home—no
Jackson's parents were not killed by Indians—which creates a vendetta
that propels him throughout the rest of the play and justifies countless
tirades, massacres and slurs against Indians.
Even Minneapolis Musical Theatre
producer and director, Steven Meerdink says, "this
show really falls short on its lack of
transparency of the fact that it does not try to accurately present historical
events and figures. The authors
deliberately skew, distort, satirize, blur, and condense roughly 60 years of
history into a 90
minute play. There are things presented in the play that never actually
occurred, and many other things presented that may have
occurred—but with dates, circumstances, or relevant people changed." Meerdink says this will appear in a program note.
Aside from skewing historical
events, the play does something much worse. Reading this play again this week
has saddened me. It's even made me think I might have to unfriend
J. Michael Freedman on Facebook.
The most common defense of the
play is that it's a South Park kind of aesthetic,
therefore it's an equal opportunity defacer. Meerdink echoes what I've heard the authors and original
producers say in person and in print, "There are ugly
things said about many groups of people in the show—the British, the Spanish,
Native Americans, and European Americans..." But Sesame Street has me thinking,
one of these things is not like the other.
The first time the British are
depicted, they are flogging Jackson. But in that scene Jackson never once makes
a racially based insult, in fact there isn't one racially based insult against
the British in the entire play, not even a gratuitous use of the word "limey."
Jackson in fact remains in control during this scene and actually walks away
from the flogging when he's had enough, leaving the British soldiers dumbfounded.
When the Spanish are
introduced, again, not one racial remark made to insult them. Instead they are simply
and accurately called Spaniards. But in the introduction to this roundhouse
fight with them, Jackson begins a joke, "Tell me what's the difference between
a little homosexual Indian boy and George Washington? Besides the fact you'd
murder either of them without thinking twice?" This joke goes unchallenged
except for the Spaniards calling back, "You are the gay."
The authors may have thought
this was a joke, perhaps even the producers and the
majority of the audience in New York when it premiered did too. But in
Minnesota, it's not funny at all. Maybe in the world Alex Timbers and J.
Michael Freedman live in, Indians are not targets of racial violence today.
Maybe the murder rate of Native Americans in their world isn't astronomical.
Maybe in their world, gay Native Americans don't have the highest suicide and
murder rate in the entire country. Then again, maybe they are right, these
unfortunate Indians are murdered without a second thought. Maybe that's the political
comment they were hoping to make with this scene and asking their audience to
be aware of and call out for a change?
It is these moments of
unchallenged cruelties raged against Native Americans that leave me pained,
even more so than the untrue history. I want so badly to be on the same side as
the authors, I know they want to prove Jackson was a troubled character in
American history with a terribly violent, unstable, genocidal mind. But when
they keep adding gratuitous brutalities against Indians I have to question what
their real organizing principle as artists actually is when Jackson says to an
Indian character, "You are despicable creatures! You show no loyalty to
anything. Your music is terrible, your table manners suck, and your painting
skills are absolutely dreadful. I mean look at this." Then a stage direction
reads, "Pulls out a primitive drawing of a buffalo." The fact is that the
writers are not satirizing this practice, they are employing
the practice as a process for writing. "Primitive" is a deeply fraught and
loaded term that has been used to justify atrocity against indigenous people
world over. It is not a benign stage direction. It trades in the same disregard
for the humanity and culture of Native Americans that this "emo
rockstar" exhibits. Where is the line? Where is the
satire?
This isn't the only instance where stage directions
give insight to the authors' points of view. After Jackson's parents are
killed, "Three young Indian boys enter and dance around... taunting [Jackson] all
the while and pretending to shoot arrows at him. They're really fucking
annoying." Because this is the post Broadway publication, I can't help but
wonder if there is an allusion to the protests the authors got from real Native
Americans; and if not, it certainly sets up what is yet to come out of
Jackson's mouth. You Indians have "No artistic vision. You're savages! You're
soulless, Godless and well you get the point." The play finds any and all
opportunities to berate Indian characters Jackson encounters.
Ultimately, watching/reading the play means putting up
with 85 minutes of racist tirades before getting to the last five minutes of
white guilt. Well, thank goodness it's a musical and I can at least enjoy
tapping my toes, at least up until Ten
Little Indians. Children's songs and nursery rhymes like this have
socialized generations of children to believe that Native people were
expendable and that there was no need to empathize with them; it was also used
to attack African Americans and to envision a future that doesn't include adult
Native or African Americans.
During Ten
Little Indians, ridiculous, inane, powerless Indian characters are coerced
into or are gladly signing their lands away for smallpox blankets and dream
catchers—dream catchers? Any Minnesotan should know that's Ojibwe not Cherokee. Then after hearing nine ways in which
Indians are killed it's reveal that the last death is a hanging.
Wow. How does that land here in Minnesota? Our state
holds the record for the largest mass hanging in U.S. history when 38 Dakota
men were executed in Mankato. Would there be any acknowledgement of this
history while the production runs? Or would the producers and creative team
just take their paychecks quietly and move on without
so much as an apology?
As the play nears its end, finally, Jackson doesn't
relent on his nauseating remarks about Native people and their culture. To
justify his defiance of the Supreme Court ruling that removal of tribes from
their land was illegal and unconstitutional, Jackson implores a Native
character Black Fox, "I wish you'd built symphonies in cities, man, and put on
plays and showed yourselves a little more essential. You know, to the culture?
And yeah, you totally were here first, absolutely, but we don't give a shit,
and we never will."
I will echo what Steve Elm, artistic director of Amerinda, an arts and theatre group in New York said, "I
felt that there was a joke that I wasn't in on... this play seemed to be
expressly written without any idea that there are Native people still alive."
And I will further say, that this play takes for granted that people from the
dominant culture don't have the capacity for kindness, change, or
self-evaluation. We have many allies here in Minnesota and they will not stand
idly by while history is whitewashed and Native culture—already imperiled by hundreds of years of misrepresentation—is
further debased as a theatrical device.
If the authors had any understanding of contemporary
Native American culture or artists, would they have been so quick to make such
debasing statements about Native Americans? Because, let's face it, these
comments are not about Indians in 1838, this is about their sense of the
absence and extinction of Native peoples right now. Perhaps this says less
about the authors themselves and more about the erasure of Native history in
this country. But as artists, who are political, and intentionally incendiary
in so much of the body of their work, there's no excuse for this ignorance and
there's no excuse for the way this ignorance is suffused throughout this play.
How would Minneapolis Musical Theatre handle these
tirades and images of violence against Native Americans? Would it be a safe
place for a Native American family to spend their Sunday afternoon? Would
Native youth that see the play feel empowered or erased and battered? How would
the MMT actors feel about saying all of these cruel lines after four weeks?
Would it get old? Would we learn anything? Would they care? Would we just say
stop?
There has to be a better way to make a political
point. The first step is to be smarter about your subject matter. Learn about
the culture you're trying to make a point about. Ask yourself, how are
contemporary people living with this historical legacy?
If you don't know what Native American artists are
doing right now here in our state, go to All
my Relations Gallery in Minneapolis, see great
Native American fine art. There's nothing primitive about it and there never
was. See shows at my company, New Native Theatre, we could produce four
original musicals with the budget Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson has, with work about, by, and for
Native Americans that honors our cultures, our
traditions, and broadens our understanding of American history. Watch dance by
Emily Johnson and Rosy Simas. Listen to First Person
Radio on KFAI. Read The Circle News. Or, look just 300 miles north to Thunder
Bay where Northwest Ontario's largest regional company, Magnus Theatre, has a
mandate to produce at least one First Nations play a year from Canada's ever growing
canon of thriving Aboriginal theatre.
I grew up in New Mexico where Native American culture
is very visible. Most of the normal markers of New Mexican culture take
directly from the architecture, iconography, and Native artists of the tribes
that have continuously lived there for time immemorial. New Mexico is not
perfect in its relationship with tribes, but certainly the dominant culture in
New Mexico embraces it, identifies with it, and protects it. As a young person,
I once attended a show in Albuquerque's big theatre, Popejoy
Hall. The Flying Karamazov Brothers came to do a comedy program. I don't
remember anything about the show this many years later, except for the moment
when that east coast based group had a short exchange where they made a Tonto
voice, a quip, then a punchline.
This happened right in the middle of a heightened moment of acrobatics, but
instead of that New Mexican audience laughing, they all stopped. Not a peep
came from that so-called funny punchline. In that
moment, I knew my community had my back. My community said in its denial of a
laugh at their punchline, that it's not ok to
stereotype and strip humanity from Native Americans. As a child that moment was
powerful. Did Minnesota have the back of the Native American children who call
this state home? Who was going to stand up for them? Or did they laugh along
with this ridiculous show and celebrate genocide?
Minnesotans should be proud that this state is where
so many great contemporary Native American leaders have lived and worked. Those
living in Minneapolis should be especially proud that only a few weeks ago
Columbus Day was changed to Indigenous Peoples Day following the example of Red
Wing which made the change a few months earlier. Perhaps the entire State of
Minnesota will come next. These are things to be proud of and these are the
ways we as Minnesotans can turn our trajectory from the violent past that was
the founding of this state to a more equitable home for all.
Is Minnesota, its audiences and artists, at that point
yet of supporting Native Americans and defending their humanity in the way that
audience did when I was a kid?
I hope so.
I think it was an unfortunate choice for Minneapolis
Musical Theatre to produce this play, and I have no doubt they played into the
same disconnect the authors did, not considering the effect it could have on
real people or that Native Americans might actually be audience members.
However, my call to action lies more with the authors who will continue to
profit from productions of this play. Their royalties should go to places that
actively do the work of dealing with Andrew Jackson's legacy—like the
Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center, Ain Dah Yung shelter for homeless Native youth, the Minnesota
Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition, or many of the other worthy
organizations directly serving Native people—and don't engage in the
play's same laissez-faire attitude of lightly encouraging audience members to
question over cocktails whether or not Andrew Jackson was an American Hitler
while aggressively dehumanizing the people Jackson tormented. Because, he was.