WINGS OF NIGHT SKY || WINGS OF MORNING LIGHT
Joy Harjo with Priscilla Page
WINGS OF NIGHT SKY, WINGS OF MORNING LIGHT
|| A Play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses ||
Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
© 2019 Joy Harjo and Priscilla Page
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill
Typeset in Minion Pro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data available upon request
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8195-7865-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8195-7866-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7867-9
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Cover photo of Joy Harjo playing the flute © Anton Dontscheff / Silvia Mautner Photography.
CONTENTS
Joy Harjo’s Wings: A Revolution on the American Stage
MARY KATHRYN NAGLE || 1
Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Ceremony
JOY HARJO || 11
Reflections on Joy Harjo, Indigenous Feminism, and Experiments in Creative Expression
PRISCILLA PAGE || 42
Toward the Production of New Native Theater: An Interview with Randy Reinholz
PRISCILLA PAGE || 59
Imagining a Contemporary Native Theater: An Interview with Rolland Meinholtz
PRISCILLA PAGE || 69
Learning to Be: An Interview with Joy Harjo
PRISCILLA PAGE || 94
Contributors || 107
WINGS OF NIGHT SKY || WINGS OF MORNING LIGHT
MARY KATHRYN NAGLE
Joy Harjo’s Wings || A Revolution on the American Stage
In my family’s blue-sky memory, we loved my father without question. We loved his laugh, his stories, his swinging us through the sky. We struggled with his fight, his jab, and his fear. When I looked through my dreaming eyes, he was still a boy of four standing by his mother’s casket. She was his beloved grandfather’s great-great-granddaughter. She liked to paint, blew saxophone in Indian territory and traveled about on Indian oil money. Still, grief from history grew in her lungs. She was dead of tuberculosis by her twenties. The grief had to go somewhere. We had no one left in our family who knew how to bury it. So it climbed onto her little boy’s back.
Joy Harjo, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light
For too long our grief has had nowhere to go. So we carry it in our lungs. We bury it in our kidneys. It cakes our hearts. We deposit it onto the backs of our children, and our children’s children.
We know our stories are medicine. We know they bring about healing. But we have not been permitted to share them. At this point in history, the American stage has, for the most part, silenced the voice of Native artists.
Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light is exceptional. It is an extraordinary work of extraordinary magnitude for several reasons, but one of its most unique, rare attributes is that it has been presented on a professional American stage. Wings constitutes one of but a small handful of Native plays to have ever been presented on such a stage. For me and the other Native playwrights in my generation, Wings stands as a source of inspiration. The impossible is possible. And now, with the publication of Wings, my hope and prayer is that Americans will come to see that our stories truly are worth reading and staging, and thus for our Native writers, worth writing.
For the generations and generations of American Indians who have never heard or seen a performance by a Native woman on a professional American stage, Joy Harjo’s Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light offers a powerful healing. Harjo’s heroine Redbird takes her audience on a journey through generations of trauma and survival in a musical revelry that celebrates American Indian resistance. For those of us still attempting to make sense of the trauma lodged in our hearts, Wings creates a release valve. Through ceremony, song, and kinship, a public space is created where healing can collectively take place and grief can be processed.
For the generations and generations of non-Natives who have been taught that American Indians are nothing more than the image on the back of a Washington, DC, football jersey, Wings commands a powerful reckoning. Wings introduces non-Native audience members to what will be, for many, their first interaction with an actual Native person.
Redbird’s journey is breathtakingly personal. Of course, when it comes to putting Indians on the American stage, the personal is political. Today, statistics reveal that Americans who go to the theater are more likely to witness the performance of redface onstage than the performance of Native stories by Native people. As a Muscogee Creek woman created by a Muscogee Creek playwright, Redbird is everything her contemporary redface counterparts in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, An Octaroon, and the Wooster Group’s Cry, Trojans! (to name a few) are not. Instead of a costume, a drunk Indian who only grunts onstage, a joke, or a stereotype, Redbird is an articulate Native woman with something intelligent—indeed profound—to say about the attempted destruction of her people and sovereign Tribal Government.
We need to see more Redbirds on the American stage. I lived and wrote plays in New York for five years. I found the entire experience rather depressing. During my five years in New York, I witnessed numerous performances of redface on many of New York’s most prestigious stages. Not once—in all of my five years—did I ever see a non-Native professional theater company produce a full-length play by a Native playwright. Indeed, I arrived three years after the Public Theater workshopped Harjo’s Wings, but they never fully produced it. I am encouraged that this publication of Wings will allow other theaters to now follow the artistic lead of Randy Reinholz and Jean Bruce Scott, co-creators of Native Voices at the Autry, who premiered the work in 2009 in Los Angeles. This is an important play that openly raises consciousness and exposes truths. I know we are ready for more productions.
To be clear, the absence of authentic