Ishi. — Do you think they could hear my wood duck stories?
(G. Vizenor, Ishi and the Wood Ducks)

1Drama has been claimed as a natural continuation of traditional formats of storytelling; a notion not lightly dismissed if the person making the claim can prove direct connections to a live oral tradition, as does Canadian Curve Lake Anishinaabe playwright Drew Hayden Taylor (Glaap 2001, 218f.). For Taylor, the extension of the narrative tone and mode of storytelling, which in many instances is more of the gossipy type, into his Blues—and Someday—series of plays, has proven quite successful, as numerous awards and prizes as well as frequent productions attest. Fellow Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor, an enrolled member of the Minnesota White Earth Reservation, and likewise an author highly conscious of the functions and impact of oral traditions, is not nearly as successful as a dramatist, and in fact the difference in style, tone, outlook, and subject matter between the two would be enough to dismantle the old essentialist school of NatAmLit criticism if this was still necessary. Among the similarities between the dramatic concepts of these two writers, however, is that both of them have moved, from various directions, into a postindian mode—not because both of them claim Anishinaabe heritage, but because there is, apparently, more than one gate to that city. I will return to this point later; but the main focus of this paper is going to be on the Vizenor-gate, on his own dramatic postindian turn.

2In terms of his relation to drama by one of the main players on the more metonymical stage of Native American culture, Vizenor is an exception in several ways. This does not come as much of a surprise, given the fact that Vizenor has always been exceptional. As a critical journalist during the most dramatic days of the American Indian Movement, as a postmodern writer among the Native American magic realists of the 1970s, and as a university scholar and critic, he has been the first to move into new fields on several occasions. Likewise, he has been among the first to challenge accepted and comfortable autostereotypes as well, while most other writers and activists were still busy denouncing heterostereotypical representations.

3Seemingly in spite of being one of the “‘urban, mixed-blood academic’ writers under periodic, often severe scrutiny by some Native writers and critics for prose deemed elitist and inaccessible” (Bernardin, 167), Vizenor has several dramatic efforts to his credit—drama being the one genre that does not easily forgive elitist inaccessibility, not even with postmodern writers. And not only has Vizenor ventured into the field of playwrighting. His plays also span a wide variety of dramatic possibilities; they are very different from his prose, and they fit in neither with the Hanay Geiogamah tradition of Native American plays, nor are they closely related to the myth-conscious Canadian school of First Nations drama as exemplified by authors like Tomson Highway, Shirley Cheechoo, Daniel David Moses, or, as mentioned above, fellow Anishinaabe Drew Hayden Taylor.

4Comparably little attention has been given to these allegedly most immediately “oral” of his textual productions. Vizenor himself does not seem to be particularly enthralled with his own theatrical ventures, if the fact that he couldn’t even find the first of his plays when asked about it is an indication. The apparently lost play was called “A Season for All Things” and was written and directed in Minneapolis in the late sixties. As far as the author remembers it “adapted selected passages from historical and literary documents to create a rather wild discourse on stage.” (Vizenor e-mail, Apr. 16, 2006). The narrative technology here as in so many of Vizenor’s other texts, however, seems to have been the pastiche format, “his citation, incorporation and juxtaposition of the words of others” (Bernardin, 168).

5His second dramatic venture, the screenplay Harold of Orange, shows another one of Vizenor’s signature strategies as well, his coinage of neologisms. There are, for all I know, more editions of the original dramatic screenplay than there are bona fide scholarly articles about the film (see Vizenor 1993, 1994, 2001, and the Vizenor Reader; vs. Silberman 1985; Ruppert 2000; also Carreiro 2003), though getting a hold of the actual movie is still difficult to impossible (a D.V.D. edition would be welcome).

6The most recent of Vizenor’s playwriting efforts is Ishi and the Wood Ducks. There is a strong intratextual current in this play in the numerous ways in which Vizenor quotes his own texts in which he has, over the past two decades, taken up and transformed the story and history of the man known to the rest of the world as Ishi. When this man surrendered himself in 1911, he was identified as supposedly the last member of the Yahi people. By virtue of being the proverbially Last of the Xyz, Ishi was allowed to live out the rest of his life as a living ethnographic object in the new Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley (Vizenor 1987; 1992; 1994; 2003).

7If Harold is a favorite of editors, more scholarly articles have been written about Ishi and the Wood Ducks than there have been productions. Compared to five articles (Pulitano 1997; Owens 1999, 2000, 2003; Mace 2000), if the three papers by the late Louis Owens are all counted independently, there are only four productions on record, none of which can count as full-scale stagings. The two productions in 1995 and 1997 by the RedPath Theater company of Chicago were apparently only stage readings of the text, as may have been the staging in 1999 by a student drama group at the University of Essex. More recently, a group of students in a University of Freiburg graduate seminar workshopped scenes from acts one and two in the Freiburg, Germany, Museum of Nature and Anthropology Lecture Hall on July 18, 2006.

8The reluctance to perform Ishi—a play, after all, by one of the leading literary masters in contemporary American letters—may come as a surprise, and will serve here as a starting point for the analysis. Ishi is an academic play, and one that brings Native American drama full circle to several of its more problematic starting points. For one, it topicalises the question of performing “Indian” (the postindian, like the postmodern and the postcolonial, does not escape its relation to that against which it must set itself off). The University of Essex is the only European University offering a Master’s program in Native American Studies. Not that this makes them, or the German students in my class, any more Native than they would be otherwise, so we may well assume that the persons cast for the “Indian” roles were British, just like Meike Beckman (Trope Brown), Michael Kößling (Zero Larkin) and Stephan Hoch (Ishi) in the Freiburg production were Germans. With that, on the purely theatrical level, we are back to whites in redface like Edwin Forrest playing “Indians”—or so at least the para-tribal Authenticity Police might claim.

9The moment of performative signification behind this issue is one Native American and Canadian First Nations drama cannot escape, and which needs to be taken into account when assessing the range and possibilities of these plays: even if they originate from community theatre efforts, and even if they are performed by travelling shows with an all-Native cast—as has of course been done, from the time the “Native American Theater Ensemble” took to the road in 1973, to De-ba-je-muh-jig from Manitoulin Island touring the U.S. in the late eighties1—the memory of Buffalo Bill’s and all sorts of other “Indian” travelling road-shows and circuses looms large, and very few people are aware of the widespread use of “Indian” images in tribal performances, be it as parody, satire, or in pastiche format, be it as adaptation or amalgamation (cf. Dräger 2006). Technically speaking, and also theatrically speaking, there is always that postcolonial level on which Native American and Canadian First Nations actors are usually either playing with, or are playing against, the pre-conceived cinematic and theatrical images of the stage and screen “Indian”.

10The question of the how (no pun intended), and whether the term “Indians” comes with or without quotation marks, indicating whose invention they are this time, whether they are “real” or post-indians (both following Vizenor statements): this may be clear to the author and the scholarly savants, but in a cybernetic genre such as drama, this is secondary. Drama in performance is constructed out of a collective cooperation of which the author is but one (if important) part. On the 1973 German audience in the Reichskabarett Berlin, for example, the play on “Indian” stereotyping intended by Hanay Geiogamah’s Foghorn was largely lost—they were still seeing “Indians,” albeit in a new pose.

11Almost thirty years later, Ishi also thematises issues of stereotypisation, and of “Indian” history—this topicality may indeed partly explain why Native American theatre groups are reluctant to produce the play. However, I would claim that this reluctance is quite literally out of place. The audience seeing Ishi and the Wood Ducks in Freiburg were seeing postindians. This raises the question of shifts and changes in theatrical environments—has Vizenor’s “school of socioacupuncture” (introduced and visible in Harold of Orange) worked?

12The older, essentialist school of NatAmLit criticism would probably have agreed with William Morgan who asserted as late as 1992 that the social function of indigenous theatres was not to meet a “need for the kind of diversion and entertainment that staged performances can and do provide.” (Morgan ix). He wanted to see them rather as carriers of

something that has been seized upon by desperate disempowered peoples as a way to heal psychic wounds, communal and individual, and to present their dilemma for consideration to the members of dominant, colonizing societies unaware for the most part of the character of the traditional cultures of those peoples (Morgan ix).

13The “Indian” motif in this text lies in the tragic tone, and the terminal creed underlying this tragic tone. While a lot of post-colonial poetry, and much fiction, may indeed work this way, drama, more so than any other genre, is a topos of ritual as well as of entertainment. In both formats, drama—performed drama, that is—is a sign of creative survivance, to use Vizenor’s term, and survivance never goes without a sense of humor.

14This opens a venue to approach Vizenor’s specific tone and drama. Both of Vizenor’s extant dramatic texts refuse and subvert the tragic pose of desperate disempowerment that traditional critics like Morgan have assigned to them. The difference is visible for example in the use and function of Oneida comedian Charlie Hill as the leading character Harold Sinseer. Hill had already been a member of the Native American Theater Ensemble in the early seventies; he appeared in Foghorn, in Berlin in October 1973. A photograph shows him wearing the typical neo-Indian dress and pose of the 1970s activists—jeans jacket, headband, bone choker. Ten years later, Vizenor cast Hill in the role of Harold Sinseer. It is easy to play a game of “Spot the Trickster” (Daniel David Moses) with Vizenor’s Harold, though the figure of Harold is called “a rotten trickster” only in the movie version, and on the soundtrack in the “Trickster” song by Buffy St Marie. However, he never condescends to “Coyote kitsch” (Vizenor), but should be seen in the context of the urban Minnesotan environment that was still Vizenor’s turf in the early 1980s. Harold is simultaneously too much of a Vizenorian word warrior to be a straight film figure, and at the same time too mimetically “real” to imply the holosexual demigod in such ways as, for example, Tomson Highway or De-ba-ja-muh-jig have constructed him/her. Harold was arguably postmodern, but at least in his reception he was not yet postindian.

As an iconic sign, viewers would believe Charlie Hill was like Harold Sinseer, the compassionate trickster. The trickster and trickster discourse would be perceived as having a solid reality. Audiences would know how tricksters walk, talk, and act. The inherent iconic emphasis of cinematic representation insists on the reality of the trickster (Ruppert 2000, 226).

15Or, rather, it insists on the reality of the well-known comedian, whose lines and actions also construct him as a con-artist in both financial matters and relationships. This results in an uneasy tension which is aggravated by the visible political situation. The postcolonial foundation situation is obvious, and the echo of the stereotyping discussions of the 1960s and 70s is still loud in the concept as well as in the dialogue. The script abounds in comical gems, but much of the genial word-play—what I have called, in my introduction to the edition and translation of the script, vizcracks and jerryspeak (Hochbruck 1994, 6)—is lost on a film or T.V.-audience conditioned on fast-cut images, but not on fast-cut, and fast-brained dialogue. And this is only what the shooting script left of the actual script, which was considerably more wordy and more literary.

Few of Vizenor’s typical neologisms survive, the “new school of socioacupuncture” being one of them and the most memorable, since it is repeated several times. One of the distances between the read and the heard text is that one cannot return to an unfamiliar expression, read it again and savour its witticism. The difference between the read and the heard/seen text also accounts for the almost total deletion of any written signs from the script [. . .] References to T. E. and D. H. Lawrence are omitted, other literary allusions and sideways glances curtailed beyond recognition: the dialogue between Andrew and Harold over the existence and pinchability of the coffee beans is shortened so as to become incomprehensible (Hochbruck/Will 1994, 102)

16This decapitation of textual sense is something the audience, captivated by Harold’s simultaneous sleight-of-hand trick with a piece of paper turning into freshly ground coffee, probably won’t even notice.

17But even where a degree of fidelity has been maintained, the result is far from clear. The subversion which James Ruppert I think correctly identified in the script often remains on the level of indexical signs: When Harold and the Warriors of Orange put on ties because “no one can resist a skin in a necktie”, the crossblood crossdressing stops with “loose knots for the mixedbloods.” The code-switching is continued in the softball game with the foundation board members wearing “Indians” and the warriors wearing “Anglos” t-shirts, and Harold moving between the teams—a switch that might have worked better if the warriors of Orange and the foundation members had not from the beginning been conforming so much to the older stereotypical formats of the 1970s, with the warriors looking like the medialized image of the cowboyified Indian (Lee 2000, 264), and even of the AIM-indian complete with braids and bone choker, and the foundation board members looking and assumedly acting like bankers and, well, like foundation board members. Harold, then, is a non-tragic trickster con-comedy which achieves its cinematic aim only by missing many of its original points, and which in an ironic turn is cinematically stuck between word warriors, and looks warriors—so to speak.

18By hindsight, we may wonder how the interpretive community this movie was aimed at can be defined. Vizenor, we must not forget, started out as an urban journalist. The young Vizenor of the sixties and seventies and even the “literary master” (Alan Velie) of the early eighties was yet gradually moving into his current international reputation as a scholar, writer, and theorist. Harold, consequently, was directed at a diffuse and mixed audience, strongly leaning towards the urban Minnesotan background that formed the backdrop for some of the play’s action, yet constructed by means of the word-power of the postmodern neologist and scholar. The resulting jerryspeak comedy is a blend of cinematic and linguistic signposting for a diffuse variety of interpretive communities.

19By the mid-nineties, and for both the production and the reception of Ishi, this situation has changed. As if as an echo of the ties and the t-shirts of Harold, Ishi in his play is crossdressed into a genuinely new theatrical formation:

Ishi wears an oversized suit and tie and carries a leather briefcase.
Slowly he removes his shoes and socks, turns the cuffs of his trousers, and then inserts leather thongs in his ears (Vizenor 1995, 302).

20At the end of the play, “Ishi puts on his shoes, ties them, waves to the judge, and then leaves the courtroom. . .” (Vizenor 1995, 336). There is a beautiful doubling irony in the fact that Vizenor evidently modelled Ishi’s stage appearance on existing pictorial evidence (see the photo of Ishi and Alfred Kroeber in Kroeber/Kroeber 2003, 30, from which the diminuitive figure of the Yana elder Sam Batwi has been edited). Fiction seems to be following truth, but for the drama scholar, an influence from the Brechtian epic theatre with its insistence on non-identificatory acting and re-presentation is evident just the same. Ishi is turned into something strange, uninhabited by any one preconceived concept, and he stays in this role and mode throughout. Likewise, there is an undercurrent of Brechtian didacticism in the encounters between Ishi and the rest of the movable configuration of the play. The interchangeability of partly historical, partly symbolic figures is enhanced by the eight other figures in the play, who take on various roles in the course of the four acts that Vizenor has divided the play into. For example, the figure representing historical San Francisco Call reporter (Mary) Ashe Miller in the first scene turns up again under the same name in the Mount Olivet Cemetery columbarium (Act Two), though the reporter in the scene enacted there which Vizenor recounts in “Mister Ishi” (Vizenor 2003, 368) was really Lorna Fernandes of the San Francisco Chronicle.

21The acts take up various historical situations and issues related to the case of the man called Ishi, and also to author Vizenor. Ishi, together with his dialogic companion, the “gipsy” Boots Story, becomes a voiceover commentary on the historically Vizenorian scenarios in the cemetery and before the UC Berkeley committee on names and spaces (really the “Space Management and Capital Programs Committee”, cf. Vizenor 2003, 369; Owens 2003, 378). The fourth scene is the most Vizenorian in tone, as Louis Owens has already pointed out (Owens 2003, 384) and it is also the most absurdly postindian, bringing in the discourse of the law where the first three acts had in turn been informed by the “Indian” discourses of the media, the arts, and the administration.

22Throughout, Ishi and the Wood Ducks is an academic play, a play of, for, and on academics. An academic play, because even though there are few theoretically or neologistically obscured dialogue passages, the play will remain incomprehensible to anyone who has not read the introduction. A play on academics, because of the comical interaction between the figures of Alfred Kroeber, Saxton Pope, Waterman, and Ishi. In the passage on photography and photographers, the dialogue parts notably of Pope and Ishi gradually intertwine until they become mutually, ironically, interchangeable. Kroeber, the original inventor of Ishi, remains more distant, and as the inventor of Ishi is a strange choice for the judge deciding on Ishi’s “indianity” at the end, but all four unite against the insistence of the reporter and the photographer to record the “authentic” “Indian.” This becomes brilliantly ad comically visible at the point where Thomas Waterman, the linguist, speaks to Ashe Miller in Yahi, creating an in-joke situation between himself and Ishi:

Miller. — What were your first impressions?
Waterman. — Delighted that we could speak a few words.
Miller. — What words?
Waterman. — Maeela
Miller. — What does “maeela” mean?
Ishi turns when he hears the word “maeela.”
Waterman. — Ishi is here, ask him.
Ishi. — Coyote stole the fire. . .
Miller. — Wait a minute, is this another coyote story?
Waterman. — When asked about his wife he tells coyote stories.
Miller. — So that’s what “maeela” means?
Waterman. — Ishi evades direct questions.
(Vizenor 1995, 314)

23Which is exactly what the figure of Thomas Waterman is doing at this moment—the passage finishes with Ishi and Waterman being “very pleased with the discussion” (Vizenor 1995, 315) in a postindian conspiracy bypassing the reporter’s insistence on authentic representations.

24This passage also may serve as an example of how Ishi is a play on meaning (s). The crisscrossing inventions and counterinventions in the play abound in intra- as well as intertextual references to previous and later Vizenor texts as well as to the existing scholarship on the historical Ishi. The embarrassing burlesque surrounding sculptor Harken Lucero’s alleged commission to create a monument to honour Ishi is easily identifiable behind the Zero Larkin of the play (cf. Vizenor 2003, 368; Vizenor 1995, 316-321), as is the comical naming ritual revolving around the renaming of Kroeber Hall which Vizenor himself had instigated in historical time (Vizenor 2003, 369; Vizenor 1995, 321-326). These intertexts carry Ishi beyond the denial of sense typical of the Theatre of the Absurd, rooting the play instead squarely in the Vizenorian journalist tradition of pastiche and satire. Simultaneously, they deny the right of anyone, be they official or tribal, to affix a stable and permanent meaning on Ishi and his memory. In the Freiburg production, Michael Kößling decided on an interpretation of Zero Larkin with grand, self-important and media-conscious gestures, which drew familiar laughs from the audience not at the “Indian” but at the poser and the pose (and was in keeping with Vizenor’s own account of the situation, see Vizenor/Lee, 1999, 76). In Ishi, the questions of race and representation are not confused any longer, and positions are constantly shifting: we never learn, for example, whether the “gipsy” Boots Story is supposed to be Native or non-Native, thus making her simultaneously both and neither.

25Playing Daniel David Moses’s game of “Spot the Trickster” on Ishi, the fact that the main figure is echoed by a female counter-image in the figure Boots Story, who, like him, does not have a “real” name, gains additional significance—as in the plays of Tomson Highway, the trickster figure is both male and female, and here it travels in two figures. These two, however, are also reminiscent of Beckett’s figures Vladimir and Estragon, as Elvira Pulitano has already pointed out in her enlightening SAIL paper, where she draws attention for example to the fact that Estragon also wants to remove his boots (Pulitano 1997, 83). To which may be added that in an ironic twist acknowledging the absurdist mode, at the end of the play the audience is still waiting for the wood ducks stories from Ishi’s first line: “Have you ever heard the wood duck stories?” (Vizenor 1995, 302). Together with Beckett’s figures, Ishi and Boots are also standing in the older European and North American Indian tradition of the sacred clowns, whose logic and whose natural rationale often defies the absurdity of their mannered and pompous environments.

26The treatment of figures and tropes is, as in Harold, comical, but comical without the aggressive undertone still informing much of the earlier, 1980s script. Ishi is the Vizenor of and since Dead Voices—witty and whimsical, world-wise and humorous with that touch of sadness which has always come with the humor of Gerald Vizenor. As a postindian play on meanings, Ishi indeed shares more with the postmodern theatre of a Tony Kushner than for example with Harold of Orange, or with the comic urban and reservation realism of Canadian playwright Drew Taylor.

27As stated above, according to the essentialist school of criticism, there should be parallels between the works of these two writers, and indeed the success of the early plays of Drew Hayden Taylor seems to echo Harold of Orange, notably in the use of humor, of wit, charm, and fast paced dialogue. A photographic “Indian” mimicry on Taylor’s part on the cover of his Furious Observations of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (2002) in the sense of an ironic self image immediately reminiscent of the softball scene in Harold, however, is purely biographical, centering on Taylor’s identity as a non-visible minority. It is absent from the plays. Generally speaking, the focus of Taylor’s plays is foremost on community-derived Canadian First Nations issues, people, and idiosyncrasies. The plays are focussed on everyday people, problems, and parole, the three big “p” s of theatrical success both in comedy and tragicomedy. These plays were originally conceived for an interpretive community of reservation and urban indians, yet always in a sense of humor that could at least partly also be relished by non-indigenees.

28Both in the plays of Vizenor and Taylor, as well as in the plays of a number of other Native American and Canadian First Nations playwrights active today, for different reasons, and coming from different directions, the performative aspect of Indians playing “Indians” is taken up and turned into a variety of iconic as well as ironic postindian gestures in postmodern language games. Taylor’s plays and Harold address an urban and reservation postindian community, extending their range through humour. Ishi and the Wood Ducks is an imaginative continuation of the theatrical dimension that was an inescapable part of Ishi’s life at the museum. In this context, however, it is important to note the metatheatrical comedy of Saxton Pope, Kroeber, Waterman and Ishi performing for “Ms. Miller Miller” in the first act, comically subverting the threatening claim of P.T. Barnum’s America to the Kroeber/Ishi duo (cf. Adams 2003, 26), referring to an offer which would have resulted in the two becoming a variety act. In historical time, Ishi was spared this fate. In theatrical time, Ishi is finally enabled to perform his postindian role not at the bidding of an entertainment industry wanting to present its own images of the “stone age man,” made visible in the photographer propositioning Ishi to strip (Vizenor 1995, 315). Ishi, however, remains “in character”, so to speak, that is, he insists on staying dressed in the ethnographically incongruous combination of suit and tie, leather thongs in his ears, and no shoes.

29Ishi speaks to a more limited, educated audience than Taylor’s plays; an audience that will recognize the intertexts as well as the theatrical tradition behind the role—and shapeshifting done by the actors. The (post-)Indian thus created is no longer an object of a sense of direction enforced by white entrepreneurship—Ishi never became a variety show exhibition piece, and by the end of the 20th century he can even afford to mount the imaginative without the anger still lurking behind Harold. Consequently the “Gattungskompetenz” (genre competence) of audiences is extended beyond the horizon of their expectations (Krieger 1998, 70), whatever these expectations might have been.