After my mother sang, she and my father fought.
Their friends scattered.
I tried to pull him off her, and he went crazy.
He threw me across the room into the wall.
What happened to the storytelling father? Where did the man go who made my mother laugh? (Wings, 28)
Wings does not shift responsibility away from individual perpetrators of violence against Native women. Instead, Redbird’s story reveals that the perpetuation of this violence is only made possible through the silencing of Native survivors. Currently, the majority of American plays portray violence against Native people as a joke, and as a result, non-Natives have no context in which they have learned to take violence against Native women seriously. And because American culture promotes the sexual commodification of Native women, the violence perpetrated against our women in our own homes is overlooked; in most instances, it simply goes unnoticed. Redbird’s sharing of the violence she and her mother have endured forces the American audience to consider a reality they have been previously told to ignore.
Wings could not come forward for publication at a time more critical in relation to the national movement to restore safety for Native women. Today, the majority of violent assaults committed against American Indians are committed by non-Indians. In fact, a 1999 report from the Bureau of Justice found that “[a]t least 70 percent of the violent victimizations experienced by American Indians are committed by persons not of the same race” (Greenfield and Smith, iv). In cases of sexual assault, research has shown that 67 percent of the perpetrators are non-Native. Thus, although historical trauma has introduced rape to our Native men who now abuse our women, our women are more likely to suffer abuse in the hands of a non-Native—someone who has learned that such abuse will be tolerated as a result of the objectification of Native women he has witnessed in American culture and society at large.
Wings does not shy away from the prevalence of non-Indian violence on Native women and children. Following the departure of Redbird’s biological Muscogee father, Redbird describes the series of suitors who entered their home, desiring her mother, including several non-Indian men who abuse Redbird, her mother, and her siblings:
A preacher dressed in black planned to save us with a lash. He had God on his side. Get down on your knees and pray for the sins of your divorced Indian mother, your Indian father, he hissed behind her back.
We helped our mother push him and his angry God out the door. (31)
In this regard, Wings touches on what has become an epidemic of non-Indian violence perpetrated against Indian women in tribal communities. It is no coincidence that Harjo graduated from Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978. That was the same year the United States Supreme Court decided Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, where they declared that American Indian Nations no longer “have criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians” who commit crimes on tribal lands. The Supreme Court in Oliphant based its decision on an earlier precedent, established in the 1823 case Johnson v. M’Intosh, that “the power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased was inherently lost to the overriding sovereignty of the United States” (Oliphant, 209, quoting Johnson v. M’Intosh, 8).
The Supreme Court in Johnson v. M’Intosh was clear. Indian tribes lost this power to dispose of their own land and could not retain title over their land because the court considered them to be “savages” and “an inferior race of people, without the privileges of citizens, and under the perpetual protection and pupilage of the government.” The court’s decision in 1823 that Indians are racially inferior and savages has never been overturned or declared unconstitutional. Instead, it remains the legal basis for the Supreme Court’s continued denial of tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction to protect Native women today.
Following the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in Oliphant, rates of non-Indian violence against Native women skyrocketed. Suddenly, non-Indian men realized they could move onto tribal lands and rape, murder, or abuse Native women, and there was nothing her Tribal Government could do to protect her or prosecute him. Having graduated from Iowa in 1978, Harjo commenced her creative career at a time when the harmful, false narrative of American Indian identity reached its climax—resulting in the legal stripping of our tribes’ inherent right to protect Native women from abuse and sexual violence. In this regard, Wings constitutes a much-needed response to the absence of the voices of Native women, both in the United States Supreme Court and on the American stage.
It is alarming that the same redface performances created to justify the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh remain alive and well on the American stage today. It should come as no surprise, then, that the laws redface helped to shape and create continue to control the lives of American Indians today. For Native women, this reality of redface is devastating.
We know stories are medicine. We know they are healing. We know that when violence is discussed out in the open—and not hidden behind a costume or celebrated in a sexy rock musical—hearts and minds will change. And we know that when hearts and minds change, laws change. And when laws change, lives are saved.
But laws will never change if the stories we tell remain the same. Without a doubt, the United States remains stuck in a nineteenth-century colonial legal framework. What does it mean when, in twenty-first-century America, the United States Supreme Court still classifies our people as “racially inferior”? It means we have to tell our stories. Stories and performances were constructed to allow the Supreme Court to conclude that we are “racially inferior”—stories that continue to find their way to the American stage today. The only way to deconstruct a falsely fabricated prejudicial story is to tell a real one.
Wings is a real story. I do not mean to infer that it is autobiographical, because it is not. Joy Harjo is not Redbird. But Harjo and Redbird are constructed from the same fabric, the same experience, the same survival. Redbird’s stories, her words, her perspective, are all derived from the perspective that playwright Joy Harjo holds as a Muscogee Creek/Cherokee woman. It is a perspective that only a Muscogee Creek/Cherokee woman can know.
Wings offers a healing not only to Native people, but to non-Natives as well. The play itself takes the form of a collective, indigenous ceremony. Indeed, the play’s opening lines welcome the audience to a ceremony: “I welcome you on behalf of the family, and thank you so much for coming out to help with our ceremony” (20).
Redbird clarifies for the non-Native audience that the performance they are about to witness is more than a play; it is ceremony. Ceremony is inherently a collective experience. Healing takes place in ceremony. And in many tribal communities, healing ceremonies involve expressive communications. Grief, shame, despair—a range of emotions may be shared, lessening the burden and trauma for all. Whether in the form of prayer or shared story, the shared communication between community members enables healing. It is no coincidence, then, that after the sharing of the Trail of Tears song, at the front of the play, Redbird announces, “Now, our ceremony begins” (22).
Following the commencement of the ceremony, the testimonials are shared. Redbird shares her story—and at its conclusion, she returns to one of the most fundamental aspects of many Native ceremonies: the giveaway. At the conclusion of Wings, Harjo writes on page 48:
(REDBIRD appears on stage carrying a basket of food and goods.)
Spirit Helper brought me home again to this table. Everything you need for your healing is here, she told me.
The table is within you; it has always been within you. You must remember to acknowledge the gifts. “You must remember to share,” she said. Then she gave me her shawl.
This giveaway is in honor of our ceremony tonight, in honor of all the gifts of struggle of every one of us here.
(Gifts are shared with the audience in this traditional giveaway.)
The giveaway at the conclusion of Wings stands in stark contrast to the culture of mainstream American theater,