Native America Calling: Robots help teach STEM and Native languages

Friday, April 21, 2023

Robots help teach STEM and Native languages

Ojibwe inventor Danielle Boyer is on a quest to make technology more accessible to interested Native students.

Boyer has given away some 8,000 robots through her program Every Kid Gets A Robot. She’s also developed a low-cost, wearable robot that helps teach Indigenous languages. She’s among groups of creative, science-savvy Native young people working to make connections between robots and education.

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Guests on Native America Calling

Danielle Boyer (enrolled citizen of the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), robotics inventor

Myra Mendez (Mescalero Apache and Gros Ventre), elementary secretary for Mescalero Apache Schools

Nate Raynor, high school science teacher for Mescalero Apache Schools

Satire is one of the American theater’s greatest tools. At its best, the genre is both an effective pedagogical tool for change and a sharply-aimed weapon for critical analysis. Larissa FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” only grazes both marks. Her dizzying spiral of a comedy, the first production of a work written by a Native American woman on Broadway, follows a group of four equally inane white people devising a high school theater piece about the origins of Thanksgiving. The irony of this group’s homogenous racial makeup is not lost on anyone, especially them. FastHorse’s attempt to have her characters bounce between extreme political correctness and overt ignorance results in a muddled theatrical experience that is not quite hilarious, not quite provocative and not quite informative, but has the aftertaste of all three. 

Surprisingly, “The Thanksgiving Play” does not begin with an Indigenous land acknowledgement. There is a short one scribbled in the show’s program, but one would think Logan — the play’s uber-progressive protagonist desperate to prove her white allyship — would require one. 

Logan is the high school drama teacher — riddled with nervous tics by standout actor Katie Finneran — directing the high school’s new, socially-conscious ode to Native American Heritage Month. It’s “far more than a Thanksgiving play” now that Logan has received a lineup of grants from race and equity justice organizations. Her partner in love, absurdity and awful, matching thrift-store scarves (simple costume design by Lux Haac) is Jaxton (Scott Foley). Never one to miss a predictable stereotype about white well-doers, FastHorse prescribes him to be a farmer’s market performer and a Buddhist yogi. And great news: Logan’s hired Native American actor Alicia (D’Arcy Carden) to join them. But we soon learn Alicia is not Native, she simply relies on ethnic-looking headshots to blur the lines. Though crushing to Logan and Jaxton, resident historian and aspiring playwright Caden (Chris Sullivan) is desperate to work with “professionals” and, therefore, less bothered by this.  

The quartet drones on about scene work once they realize that no Natives are present — an eerie metaphor for the erasure of Native bodies, voices and art across this entire nation. Should they represent people who are not present? 

FastHorse’s script takes annular laps to answer this impossible question, while interspersing sobering historical facts about the origins of Thanksgiving. But without fail, the ensemble’s nonsensical rambles about privilege swallow those harsh truths. Making a mockery of woke culture is an interesting foundation for a play, but FastHorse — who truly is one of our industry’s strongest champions of inclusion and has radically opened doors for Native people in the arts — is poking at race relationships here, where she ought to be stabbing. You feel the play inching towards greater implications about cultural genocide, but opting out — as if no one in the audience should sit too long with the reality of tragedy before hearing a joke about mason jars and soy cheese. 

Of course, no playwright, especially a non-white playwright, should have to wade in trauma if they don’t choose to, but I found myself longing for even a glimmer of FastHorse’s own disappointment, advice — even rage — to underscore all the derision. 

“The Thanksgiving Play” and all of its players are almost too aware of the jokes they are telling, so no aspect of the play feels real. Director Rachel Chavkin makes sure that Carden plays dumb. Foley plays hyper-diplomacy. Finneran plays earnestness. Sulllivan plays desperation. None are being human. And while that lack of depth is an example of FastHorse’s critique, it is also the source of my disinterest. 

What is interesting, however, is designer Riccardo Hernandez’s nostalgic delight of a classroom set adorned with a sprawling world map, cherubic headshots of students bordering the walls and a cluttered teacher’s desk with one of those old-school pencil sharpeners you have to crank by hand. My favorite detail is a poster on the back wall of “The Shipment” — an unsettling play, co-written by Young Jean Lee and her cast of five Black performers that challenges racial biases about Black people. Like FastHorse, Lee is a “first.” After decades of self-producing avant-garde work, Lee became the first female Asian American playwright on Broadway with “Straight White Men,” another satire produced by Second Stage featuring an all-white cast debating privilege. It hardly felt coincidental and, sure enough, when I looked back at FastHorse’s script, she mandates use of that poster in her stage directions. 

Like “Straight White Men,” “The Thanksgiving Play” feels like a reactionary work, a play that takes aim at an industry more willing to champion ideas about artists of color than artists of color themselves. FastHorse deserves more. Because she knows better than anyone that Native artists are here and ready to work. Just not in this play. 

“The Thanksgiving Play” opened at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater on April 20, 2023.

Review photo by Joan Marcus.

Creative: Written by Larissa FastHorse; Directed by Rachel Chavkin; Scenic design by Riccardo Hernández; Costume design by Lux Haac; Lighting design by Jeanette Oui-Suk Yew; Sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman; Projection and video design by David Bengali; Hair and makeup design by Brittany Hartman; Production stage management by John C. Moore; Casting by The Telsey Office, Will Cantler and Karyn Casl.

Produced by Second Stage Theater under artistic director Carole Rothman and interim executive director Lisa Lawer Post. 

Cast: D’Arcy Carden, Katie Finneran, Scott Foley, Chris Sullivan, Clea Alsip, Christopher Ryan Grant and Amy Staats with film appearances by Ishan De Silva, Mollie Fink, Atticus Scott-Williamson and Dasan Turner.

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TAHLEQUAH, Oklahoma – Indigenous artists of the past, and today’s artists, are helping mold the future, an expert on curating artwork told an audience during a recent event in the capital city of the country’s largest Native tribe.

Dr. Miranda Belarde-Lewis, assistant professor at the University of Washington and a curator, spoke during the 50th annual Symposium on the American Indian at Northeastern University.

“Relationality is something we have latched onto, how native communities continue to make our systems of knowledge visible,” she said.

Tribal relationships with the land, water, ceremonies and stories are the nouns in the vocabulary she used, resulting in the objects people can see in museums. The verbs are people’s actions — how indigenous people deliberately engage with the world, through their people, places and ideas. Proper curating of art work is imperative in reflecting indigenous people’s culture now and helping it create change in the future.

Belarde-Lewis showed the photo of a robe created by an artist in Sitka, AK. A school of herring, depicted in gold, swim across a burgundy background. The fish are plentiful on the back of the road, diminishing to a narrow group of fish and finally a single fish as they approach the wearer’s neck.

The robe was created to protest the path to extinction facing the herring because of overfishing.

“Commercial fishing — they just scoop up everything in their nets,” Belarde-Lewis said. “This is showing how the herring would swim everywhere, but now they are getting channel into this little area.”

The fish population has been depleted because of man’s activities — including pollution and overfishing. The robe depicts the situation in an effort to depict this depletion and encourage change.

Belarde-Lewis praised the work of several artists, including Cherokees Roy Boney Jr. and Jane Osti.

Boney has the skill to say things creatively on a regular basis with meaning in his Daily Sketches.

“Colonization is a system because it works every day. It doesn’t take a day off,” she said.

Osti, a renowned potter, creates clay vessels and paddles “showing how long our systems of technology are unique to us.” The pottery isn’t necessarily flashy but it depicts tradition and objects that have been useful to Cherokee cooks for centuries.

“All the people who Jane has worked with, who Jane is mentoring, they will continue that technology,” Belarde-Lewis said.

She also spoke of artist collectives, saying they were working toward a future where all indigenous creatures can thrive side by side.

Some people are put off by believing art musicians are snobby institutions not relevant to most people. But curating according to Belarde-Lewis’ philosophy encourages communication and discussing art as it is socially relevant.

“Sometimes it’s as simple as pulling up a chair and talking to people,” she said.

Among the contemporary curators she praised was America Meredith, a Cherokee and editor of First American Art magazine.

She and other renowned curators have the wealth of experience needed for cultural preservation, Belarde-Lewis said. They can walk into a gallery and tell if something just isn’t right. They can work correct the exhibit, to make it convey the message needed in today’s society.

“The artists are leading the way. The curators are holding it and the curators are presenting their work to our people and the world,” she said.

She quoted Dr. Jolene Rickard on how curating tribal art relates to sovereignty: “Sovereignty is the border that shifts indigenous experience from a victimized stance to a strategic one. The recognition of this puts brains in our heads and muscle in our bones.”

The curator’s knowledge and discretion are imperative, Belarde-Lewis said.

“The artists are leading the way. The curators are holding it and the curators are presenting their work to our people and the world,” she said.

“There are a lot of things that are out of our control, but our choices are our own.”

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