“I do feel like it’s necessary to have our voice, Native voice,” said Welana A. Queton, who served as cultural advisor and assistant director for the original play “Channeling Our Ancestors,” which she co-created with other Osages and Natives for seventh graders in Tulsa Public Schools.
The play was presented by the Tulsa Performing Arts Center as part of the Any Given Child program by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. After its director, Becca Worthington, had to leave early for a performance, Queton stepped in to direct.
The performances took place after six weeks of rehearsal in mid-February on a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, with two runs of the show each day. Terri McGilbra, TPAC’s programming manager, and Sara Phoenix, TPAC vice president of development, provided the Native artists with the opportunity.
The cast was majority Osage, in fact, starring Jason Tillery, Elise Bear and Lulu Goodfox alongside Devyn Wickson, Kiowa, and Simon Washee, Cheyenne and Arapaho/Cherokee. The show opened with Goodfox, who is also Pawnee, playing a teen girl watching TV.
“She’s kind of being a young girl,” Queton said, “Like: ‘Ugh, I don’t want to [help in the kitchen]. I don’t want to help you.’ There’s also teaching moments in all of these things, so that’s what we’re also trying to get through. … ‘Hey, this is what we do as Indian people. We help and we cook and this food is healing.’”
After helping her aunt, played by Elise Bear, to make dough, Goodfox sits down to watch a Native streaming service. “Kind of like Netflix, but all Native shows,” said Queton.
Jason B. Tillery, who has worked on “Killers of the Flower Moon” as a featured background actor, said the theatre aspect of the performing really clicked for him. “It’s live, it’s not recorded. You can really feel it, you can kind of get it across … I think our stories, being that we’re an oral people, you know traditionally … Those stories, our stories, can be expressed and relayed a little better [in theater].”
Leading up to the performance, Tillery was concerned that the students might be mocking or negative. But they weren’t. During a game show-style sketch, the students saw their teachers come up as contestants and fail to answer questions about Natives. They went wild, he said. “We almost lost the kids. They never got out of control, but I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. If it goes much further … but they were fine. We worked really hard to keep the material real to them.” Tillery is Osage as well as Cherokee, and found out about the show through Worthington, who is his cousin on his Cherokee side.
Goodfox, who is 16 and the former Osage Nation Princess, was happy to add the play to her acting resume. She has acted on screen, on stage and done voiceover work and “loves it all,” said her mother Alyssa Goodfox. It was Lulu who came up with the title “Channeling Our Ancestors,” and she narrated the skits through her own eyes as a teenager flipping through the all-Indigenous television programming.
“The kids reacted and interacted with everything,” said Lulu. She most loved the spoken word performance by Devon Wickson, a Kiowa actor, as well as “The Bold and the Bougie,” a soap opera that was “so funny,” she said.
The soap opera addressed Pretendianism, said Bear, and the next TV show to follow was modeled after The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Cherokee/Cheyenne and Arapaho fancy dancer Simon Washee was a celebrity guest, and Bear interviewed him after he danced.
“It’s something that’s a little more tangible,” said Bear of the dancing. “Then I come out and thank him … I’m supposed to be playing some standard white person who has never interacted with Native people from Oklahoma. ‘So, did you ride your horse out here?’” she asked Washee.
“Actually, I drove here in a Honda,” he replied.
“But horses are still important to your race, right?” countered Bear.
To that, one of the kids in the audience shouted out, “‘racist!’” said Bear. She laughed. “They were engaged, they were loud … They were eating it up!”
Like Tillery, Queton shared that she was surprised by the student responses. “Each sketch contained learning moments for the student audiences. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t give these predominantly non-Native students the benefit of the doubt. They were already empathetic [and] knowledgeable of what’s correct [and] wrong,” she wrote on Facebook.
Bear was worried about censorship in Oklahoma education. “I didn’t know how this [play] overlapped with the state education … [but] that never seemed to be something that came up for the TPAC. They just said, ‘do what you do, make it cool’ … It’s a big loophole,” Bear said she was glad that they could share information without censorship. “We made it fun and we made it PG and we made it honest,” she said.
That honesty showed up right in the first segment, a news station program talking about the Joe Biden apology for Boarding Schools as well as the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. “We talked about the Sovereign Bodies Institute trying to create [a] database [of missing persons]. We wanted to make sure that it was like, ‘Hey, all these people are going missing and being killed,’ but … ‘this is what somebody’s doing about it,’” said Bear. “We talked about all that within the first ten minutes of the show.”
During a segment called “Definitely Not Dora,” she taught the kids how to say hello in Osage, Muscogee Creek, Cherokee, “because that all converges here in Tulsa, so that was important to us to have representation of all three tribes.” Tillery was proud of that detail in the script, he said.
The play also included a commercial focused on appropriation with Spirit Halloween costumes and appropriated tribal patterns at Forever 21. “Tired of seeing costumes like these? Why buy from these brands when you can simply buy from Native people,” Bear said. “I gave them different people to buy from like Weomepe Designs, Ribbon Roots, Urban Native Era. I was like, ‘You can even look local at the Southwest Trading Company located right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma!’”
Erin Parker, who is Cherokee/Kiowa/Kickapoo/Absentee Shawnee, chaperoned students to the Tulsa Performing Arts Center to see “Channeling Our Ancestors.”Parker said it was a creative and interactive way to teach students about Native issues. “I loved it!” she wrote in a Facebook post.
“It’s possible that we’re going to try to perform this in November for Native American Heritage Month,” said Queton, “So family and friends can see it.” She is hoping that after seeing the play, the students know, “We’re like you … but we have this culture we have to tend to, and we have to do this and this and this, and we have this language we have to keep on.”
TPAC wrote that the program brought “the magic of live theatre to ten schools and 1,200 … students,” in a post on social media. “With the support of your generous donations, we were able to present an original production featuring Native American artists, exploring themes of resilience and identity. This powerful performance enriched the 7th-grade curriculum on Native American history, blending art and education in a truly unforgettable way.”
Bear said taking part in the play was a wonderful experience. “It’s my first year out of school … and I’ve been able to work in theatre pretty consistently … I’ve been in other devising rooms where it’s just sometimes just hard,” she said. She graduated last year from Oklahoma City University with a major in theatre and performance, and a minor in directing, film and dramaturgy. “I’ve never worked in a space like this before where we’re all just Native people trying to make something that not only is about us and honest and true to us but is accessible to kids and possibly a predominantly non-Native audience.”
Goodfox has wanted to act since the third grade when she attended theater camp and said the experience gave her more understanding of what goes into a professional theater production. Currently, school is a barrier to doing much theatre work but she was grateful that she got approval to participate in the play. Her biggest interest going forward is in screen work, she said.
Tillery is interested in more theatre work after doing the play, which he found to be “exciting and terrifying at the same time,” he said.
Queton, currently the Mellon Fellow for Native Art at Philbrook, is also interested in more theatre, particularly as it intersects with performance art, she said. While living in Colorado, she was involved with theatrical productions and after putting on the Wahzhazhe Puppet Theatre, she has ideas for more. “I always border on [performance art,]” she said, sharing that she is drawn to direct and straight to the point work that can “make someone think,” she said.
With this play, the Osage artists came together and they did that.
