The Forgotten Manifesto that Reshaped Native Performance Art

Around a decade ago, the Tlingit curator Candice Hopkins and a colleague were looking through the archives of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe when they came across a document published in 1969. Written by the Cherokee artist and fashion designer Lloyd Kiva New and Rolland R. Meinholtz together with IAIA students, Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Progress attempted to set out what a distinctly Native form of contemporary theatre might look like.

The text was not proposing performance as something new to Native societies, where traditions of storytelling and ceremony long predated European settlement. Rather, it sought to establish a framework through which those traditions could form the basis of a contemporary theatre controlled by Native artists themselves. It would come to be associated with what became known as the New Native Theater movement.

Its timing was significant. In November 1969, Indians of All Tribes began their occupation of Alcatraz Island, a protest against federal policies that sought to dismantle tribal cultures. The activists occupied the former federal prison for 19 months. The action became one of the defining moments of the emerging Red Power movement and a broader campaign for Native sovereignty.

Although the two events were not directly connected, they emerged from the same moment. As Native activists demanded greater control over their land and government, artists were also challenging who had the authority to represent Native cultures.

Ethnographic photographs, museum displays and anthropological records had long presented Native people through the eyes of outsiders. Theatre offered artists control. It could also be confrontational: a stereotype could be inhabited and ridiculed, or the conventions of the museum turned back on the institution itself.

That history forms the basis of Hopkins’s exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, which premiered at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York in 2023 and has now arrived at SITE Santa Fe, less than a mile from the institution where the manifesto was first published. Featuring more than 100 works by more than 40 artists and collectives, it takes the rediscovered IAIA document as its starting point, placing it within a wider idea of “visual sovereignty”.

One of the earliest examples comes from Spiderwoman Theater, the pioneering company founded in the 1970s by sisters Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel and Muriel Miguel. Emerging from the feminist movement and its founders’ frustration with the treatment of women within radical political groups, the company combined storytelling, satire and performance to challenge reductive representations of both Native people and women.

Recently digitised footage in the exhibition documents its production Cabaret: An Evening of Disgusting Songs and Pukey Images (1978–80), which used humour and parody to attack clichés around women and romance.

A powerful section focuses on the late artist James Luna, who was of Payómkawichum, Ipai and Mexican heritage and critiqued the pervasive effects of colonialism on Native communities. In Artifact Piece (1987), first performed at the San Diego Museum of Man in the late 1980s, Luna lay inside a vitrine on a bed of sand and presented himself as an ethnographic artefact, referencing how museums frame Native people as relics of the past. Labels around him identified scars on his body and described events from his life.

When Luna spoke about the piece, he recalled that viewers seemed relatively comfortable seeing a body displayed in a museum; the only moment they became uncomfortable was when they realised he was alive.

The work has since been activated by the Iñupiaq/Athabascan artist Erica Lord, who will reprise it during the run of the show.

James Luna, AA Meeting/Art History, 1990–91(still). Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego

Another work by Luna, AA Meeting/Art History (1990–91), considers the historical trauma and systemic socioeconomic disparities that contribute to alcoholism in Native communities. Luna recreated an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with strewn cigarettes, polystyrene cups, beer bottles, a Bible and four folding chairs arranged in a semicircle around a television. The 28-minute video includes a monologue by Luna, who is filmed drinking 40-ounce beers, and others sharing their experiences with alcoholism.

Another highlight comes from Hopkins’s own collection. The installation Indian Records, Inc. (n.d.) comprises a vitrine of 22 vinyl records from a music label founded in Oklahoma by Oscar Humphreys, who was not Native but travelled to various Native communities to record ceremonial and non-ceremonial songs. The label was active from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s and had largely been forgotten before Humphreys’s son rediscovered the records in the family’s garage and brought them to Hopkins’s attention. The records are installed alongside a listening station, with striking photographs of the communities they came from on the sleeves.

On an adjacent wall, the Kwakwaka'wakw artist Sonny Assu’s Ellipsis (2012), a wall-mounted sculpture composed of copper records, references the artist’s first encounter with his great-grandfather’s songs at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, now the Canadian Museum of History. It also draws on recordings by the ethnomusicologist Ida Halpern, who fled Nazi persecution in Europe and began documenting Native ceremonial music in the late 1940s, during the final years of Canada’s potlatch ban. The arrangement of the copper plates evokes sound waves and volume.

Another work that will activate the museum during the exhibition is the Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin’s White Carver (2012–present), which speaks to the cultural cannibalisation of Native art.

The work will be performed for around three hours every Saturday by a wood carver recruited through an open call, who follows a script by the artist. The narrative of the work is that a white man discovered Native carvings, purchased some authentic Native tools, began carving and now sees himself as just as good as – or even better than – Native carvers. The performer has conversations with visitors as he carves a wooden sex toy in the style of traditional Northwest Coast carving.

The joke is crude, but the premise speaks directly to the work’s title: the performer acquires the tools and techniques of Native carving until he comes to regard its cultural authority as his own.

More than half a century after Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Progress proposed a contemporary theatre shaped by Native experiences and traditions, the works gathered in Santa Fe show how enduring that question of artistic control has proved.

During a walkthrough of the exhibition, Hopkins called it one of the most important achievements of her career. “It’s interesting that the show closes in Santa Fe because of the effects of that moment and particularly how it brought American Indian issues to the forefront for the broad public and helped usher in what’s called the self-determination paradigm,” she says.

“Unfairly, in visual art, at least, there hasn’t been enough of a critical look at the relationship between theatre and visual art. People always look to other departments before theatre.”