The University of Wyoming Museum welcomed Artistic Director of Native Youth theater company, Red Eagle Soaring, Tara Moses. For the museum’s 50th anniversary show, the university opened a new theme of, The New West. Their goal is to refrain from new ideas and show traditional narratives to highlight the indigenous voices.
Moses, a Muskogee citizen, shares her voice about the contemporary American theater landscape. Moses started auditioning for theater after she moved from her reservation in Tusla, Oklahoma, when she was eight years old.
“I was moving from a place where I was just surrounded by natives all day every day, until all of a sudden I’m in a new school, a new community, and I’m the first and only native they’ve ever had… I was really missing that true feeling of community, and theater slowly brought that back to me.”
American Theatre is a colonized art form, rooted in the Western European model of theater. When Moses tried to start as a performer, she noticed quickly that they did not want her to succeed in that area due to the indigenous background she carried.
This experience sparked Moses’ true reasoning for her interest in theater as a career was when she saw the lack of representation for Native Americans in the field. She wanted to be one of the first as producers to open up playwrights with raw native storylines.
“Whenever you give Native artists and artists these positions of power, we’re able to flatten this hierarchy and really center authenticity, community and culture and ritual, fully. All of these artists are all lifted up, and we’re able to share parts of ourselves that the American stage has never seen before.”
Moses speaks out continuously on her views on the topic and expresses her love for theater but that the narrative behind some playwrights need to change and start to bring out true culture. One of her main ideas behind this was when she did the production of Pocahontas and used real native ideas and values.
She directed it at Sante Fe Playhouse in Georgia. Pocahontas is known as the first in to indigenous films and playwright. Although, it still never brought the true, native ideas.
“It was a super traumatizing experience to create work, not for Native people, but so centered on like such a hard story that so many Native people, especially native women understand and to see most of the true meaning of the story taken out, especially the missing and murdered indigenous women girls, and to spin it into a white narrative”
When Moses started directing, she brought about the idea of Creative Sovereignty, which is the inherent ability to self govern how we tell our stories. When Moses directs, she wants it to be from the true background of the story she’s telling and not something to fit the popular demand.
Moses empowers Native artists, centers authenticity in productions, and discusses reframing classic plays to include indigenous perspectives and challenge colonialism.
“The first indigenous playwright to reach New York wasn’t until 2019. The most depressing success.”
