Anna Deavere Smith and Salmon

On Monday, the Yurok Tribe hosted a performance by Anna Deavere Smith in Klamath.  It was first of all, the best hosted event I can recall attending on the North Coast.   We strangers from Arcata were welcomed--and fed.  Very very well.  Before and after.

 Her presentation, "Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education/The California Chapter" about "the school-to-prison pipeline"was taken from her show at Berkeley Rep.  The larger project is funded by the Ford Foundation and others, and this local appearance seems to have been partially funded by the California Endowment.

Speaking of her research visits previously with the Yurok, "my time with the tribe was one of the most transformative experiences of my life," she declared on KHSU Homepage, and repeated at the performance.  Her quest to explore the American character for the past forty years, she said, lacked Native American voices. Her attempts to access those voices were rebuffed by those who understandably resisted others speaking for them.  But the Yurok tribe, the largest in California, welcomed her, and her presentation included several people she met there, including tribal court chief justice Abby Abinanti, and a fisherman she had interviewed just that morning.

She began with two focusing inspirations: her grandfather telling her that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you," and the two-line poem "I, the song/I walk here."  That's a pretty good description of what she does.

Her method is to use the actual words of those she interviewed, though in reconstructed form as a kind of poetry, and to capture their personalities and voices in her performance.  At the end of her program in Klamath she spoke words of the great writer and activist of the 1960s James Baldwin, and from what I remember from his interviews and documentary appearances, she had him down cold.  So I expect her other portrayals were on the money as well.

Her artistry and methodology is exciting and inspiring, and together with the relationship with the audience, shows what theatre can do.  But the content of what these people were saying--about school, prison and everything in between--stays long afterwards. (She explains some of the issues and the intent of her project in this PBS interview.)

Shorn of abstractions and analysis, these voices clarify, and connect directly. They can however make more meaningful the studies which describe the effect of trauma on learning, and the recent finding that trauma can be passed to later generations genetically as well as culturally.

Although her main focus was the school-to-prison pipeline identified as such in a speech by President Obama  (with voices from Baltimore, Philadelphia and elsewhere as well as California) she began with a Yurok voice talking about the cultural, economic, political and personal meaning of fishing on the river, and recalling the Fish War of 1978.

This summer the Yurok tribe, the Hupa and other local tribes have been working to persuade federal authorities to increase the flow of Trinity River water into Humboldt County to prevent the kind of salmon die-off that happened on the lower Klamath in 2002.  As of this week, when a district court judge denied the attempt of central valley water districts to halt the increased flow, they have been successful.

The 2002 salmon die-off is at the center of a play created by an ad hoc group of Native and non-Native community members that HSU Theatre presented in 2006, called Salmon Is Everything.  As noted here, a book about the production and the issues it raised was published last fall, and it (also titled Salmon Is Everything) is HSU's 2015-16 Book of the Year.

On Sunday August 30 at 2 p.m., there will be a staged reading of excerpts from the play at the Van Duzer Theatre.  Theresa May, the book's author, will talk afterwards and lead a discussion.  It's free and open to the public.  There are more details at HSU Stage & Screen.

Update: The Van Duzer was nearly full for the 2 p.m. reading of Salmon is Everything on Sunday.  The audience included distinguished members of the Yurok tribe who had been involved in the Anna Deavere Smith project.  The reading was well-received and seemed to renew enthusiasm for the play to be mounted again.   During the discussion afterwards, someone said that the process of creating it and the play itself had been a milestone, and that recent progress in getting the Trinity water for the salmon this year would not have happened without this play in 2006!

Salmon Is Everything: Event and Book

I attended the reading at Northtown Books by members of the Klamath Theatre Project on Friday evening.  Marlon Sherman, Suzanne Burcell and Theresa May talked about how the project came about, and Mary Campbell (member of the original cast) and co-director Jean O'Hara read excerpts from the play.

From Marlon Sherman and Suzanne Burcell (Karuk), I was impressed by how open they were to the idea in the beginning, which was suggested by Theresa May, a new member of the HSU theatre faculty at the time, in response to the massive fish kill on the Klamath in 2002.  They were instrumental in recruiting Native students, conspicuously absent (then and much of the time since) from HSU theatre.  These students went back to their Karuk, Yurok and Hupa families and gathered relevant stories.

In reading excerpts from her chapter in the book, Suzanne Burcell described the rebellious shock of Native students to the idea that the point of view of competitors for Klamath water, the farmers and ranchers upriver, had to be represented.  She also noted with humor how Teresa May reacted to her suggestion that they also had to include the point of view of the fish.

The first part of the book describes the process of developing the script.  I also attended the first reading of the script in progress, and confess I didn't see how a theatre piece was going to emerge from it.  But according to the book, this reading inspired more people to come forward with personal and family stories, and these provided the human and cultural dimensions to the political and scientific that made the moment so alive on stage.

I reproduced my immediate response to that first production in the post below.  Since I've had cause recently to reflect on my nine years of writing about North Coast theatre, I would still place the 2006 HSU production of Salmon Is Everything near the top of my theatre experiences here.  For one thing, it was the most alive, especially in the emotional connection between those on stage and those in the audience.  And it meant something.  Certainly it spoke at the time to several areas of my experience here--working for Seventh Generation Fund, writing the script for the environmental video Voices of Humboldt County: Cumulative Impact which was cited in at least one forest court case, and writing the grant for the Native Performance Fund, still going now as the Native Art Fund. Even beyond the textures represented by these and other experiences, as a live theatre event it was singular in my experience here.

The heart of the book is the script itself.  Jean O'Hara describes touring it to Hupa, Yurok and Karuk communities.  In 2011 it got a full production at the University of Oregon, where Theresa May now teaches.  Her own chapter details what worked and what didn't in the process of creating the play, for she means this book to be a kind of guide to community-developed theatre.  A foreword by Gordon Bettles provides some historical context, and here and elsewhere in the book there are updates on what has happened since.

The book is Salmon Is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed by Theresa May with Suzanne Burcell, Kathleen McCovey and Jean O'Hara, published by Oregon State University Press in their First Peoples series.  It's at Northtown Books and presumably other booksellers.

This North Coast Weekend: A Special Event

Back in 2006, a community-based play was presented at HSU and elsewhere called Salmon Is Everything. At 7 p.m. on Friday October 10, several participants in that process and production will be at Northtown Books, with their book about it all: Salmon Is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed.

Scheduled to be present are Theresa May, Jean O’Hara, Suzanne Burcell (Karuk), & Kathy McCovey (Karuk) and special guest Marlon Sherman.

The invitation reads: "After a devastating fish kill on the Klamath River, tribal members and theatre artists developed a play to give voice to the central spiritual and cultural role of salmon in tribal life. Join the authors for readings from the play and hear their own stories about the creative collaboration and the significance of salmon among the people of the Klamath River."

Here's my Stage Matters commentary from 2006:

Going to theatre is an act of faith in its potential, and an act of hope that this will be one of the times it is realized. Of all that theatre is capable of, the expression and even creation of community around public issues is one of the most complex, and possibly, the most rare. But on a Friday evening early in May in the Studio Theatre at HSU, I saw it happen.

 It was the opening night of three performances by the Klamath Theatre Project, an ad hoc group of Native and non-Native faculty and community members, and some 30 students, most of them from local tribes, who worked for two years to collect interviews, studies and stories, and to create presentations arising from the 2002 Klamath River fish kill, a watershed event in all senses. But I doubt anyone involved could have predicted what would happen on that stage.

 Salmon Is Everything dramatized a series of interweaving encounters of fictional characters---a young Yurok-Karuk fisherman and his wife, a non-Native rancher and his mother, a graduate student in biology and a Hupa fish biologist, several Karuk, Yurok and Klamath elders, plus family members, a farmer, tourists, a reporter and a priest, among others. Their interaction illuminated some of the ways the Klamath water crisis affected them all, though the emphasis was on the Native communities where salmon has been the center of life and culture for untold generations.

 The cast was composed of Natives and non-Natives (as was the audience): elders, youth and children. Not many had acting experience, but there was not an abashed breath of amateurism anywhere--from the first moment everyone was poised, clear, warm and authentic. It was an illuminating ninety minutes, and a powerful night of theatre.

 There were heartfelt declarations presented with such conviction and authority that several actors (Native and non-Native) were moved nearly to tears by their own words. Yet the cast also moved in and out of dramatic scenes with the skill of theatrical veterans.

 There was power also in a simple scene of women beginning to weave baskets as they talked: this clearly is from their lives. And when two Brush Dance skirts were brought out, you could feel the intake of breath in the audience. As Native and non-Native characters talked of their lives and those of their forbearers, such historical terms as “Termination” and “allotments” attached themselves to real consequences and fates.

 The Project’s attempt to bring a community together without any culture losing its integrity, to find common interest and common ground, turned out to be mirrored in the form of this presentation. It brought together key elements of European-based theatre with elements of Native cultures derived in part from storytelling and ceremony.

 Though they are sometimes reluctant to express their concerns to outsiders, I have heard Native people speak their thoughts and from their hearts in primarily Native gatherings. I have also seen several well-meant, polished but inadequate theatre pieces concerning Native history and culture presented by non-Natives. But even as a work-in-progress, I have never seen anything like this. I wish I had space to name everyone who had a hand in creating it. I felt my faith restored, and my hope rewarded.