Monday, September 21, 2009
New blog
I am in the process of working with a designer to redesign my carolyndunn.com website. In the meantime, my blog has moved to http://realhollywoodindian.blogspot.com/
mvto!
carolyn
mvto!
carolyn
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Test
Free event!!! Join us at the Autry National Center, Sat. Jun 27th!
Just got back from a wonderful week of rehearsals and rewrites and the most awesome phlegm-producing brownies a person could ask for down in San Diego. Thank you to all who came out and helped workshop my play The Frybread Queen at the La Jolla Playhouse on Saturday, June 21st!
The Frybread Queen is the story of a family coming to grips with the suidice of a beloved son, husband, and father, and all of the ghosts that such a death can bring about. I had the pleasure of working with director Scott Horstein, with whom I had worked with before as an actor in Julie Pearson Little Thunder's play The Girl Who Was Captured By Ghosts, and dramaturg Robert Caisley. Rounding out the team is our Directing Intern Jennifer Bobiwash and stage manager Joan Marie Hurwit. Scott is the director of play development with Cornerstone Theatre in Los Angeles and Rob is a well-known playwright and director and they are so much fun to work with and be a drama nerd with. Jenn was my AD on Arigon Starr's staged reading of The Red Road in 2006 and directed our last staged reading of The Frybread Queen in November 2008. Joan is a recent SDSU School of Theatre grad and a wonderful dramaturg and blogger who worked on my good pal Joy Harjo's Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light.
We were so blessed to have our entire cast return from last fall's reading: my very best Creek/Kickapoo girlfriend, the multi-talented Arigon Starr reads as Annalee Hayne, the former wife of the deceased; LaVonne Rae Andrews (Tlingit) portrays matriarch Jessie Burns; stage and screen vet Kateri Walker (Saginaw Chippewa) portrays Carlisle Burns, Jessie's daughter-in-law, and the lovely and talented 16 year old going on 30 Rayanna Zaragoza (Tohono-O'odham) reads as Lily, Jessie's granddaughter who must come to terms with her father's death.
The staged reading at the La Jolla Playhouse was the first of two readings this summer of The Frybread Queen; the next one will be at the Wells Fargo Theater at the Autry National Center in Griffith Park in Los Angeles Saturday June 27th, at 1:00 pm. This staged reading is FREE and is a wonderful opportunity to see not only my work but Terry Gomez' Carbon Black and Dawn Dumont's The Fancy Dancer. Carbon Black reads on Friday evening, the 26th at 8:00, and The Fancy Dancer, which also features Kateri Walker, reads at 4:00 on Saturday.
Did I mention the readings are FREE?
The Frybread Queen is the story of a family coming to grips with the suidice of a beloved son, husband, and father, and all of the ghosts that such a death can bring about. I had the pleasure of working with director Scott Horstein, with whom I had worked with before as an actor in Julie Pearson Little Thunder's play The Girl Who Was Captured By Ghosts, and dramaturg Robert Caisley. Rounding out the team is our Directing Intern Jennifer Bobiwash and stage manager Joan Marie Hurwit. Scott is the director of play development with Cornerstone Theatre in Los Angeles and Rob is a well-known playwright and director and they are so much fun to work with and be a drama nerd with. Jenn was my AD on Arigon Starr's staged reading of The Red Road in 2006 and directed our last staged reading of The Frybread Queen in November 2008. Joan is a recent SDSU School of Theatre grad and a wonderful dramaturg and blogger who worked on my good pal Joy Harjo's Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light.
We were so blessed to have our entire cast return from last fall's reading: my very best Creek/Kickapoo girlfriend, the multi-talented Arigon Starr reads as Annalee Hayne, the former wife of the deceased; LaVonne Rae Andrews (Tlingit) portrays matriarch Jessie Burns; stage and screen vet Kateri Walker (Saginaw Chippewa) portrays Carlisle Burns, Jessie's daughter-in-law, and the lovely and talented 16 year old going on 30 Rayanna Zaragoza (Tohono-O'odham) reads as Lily, Jessie's granddaughter who must come to terms with her father's death.
The staged reading at the La Jolla Playhouse was the first of two readings this summer of The Frybread Queen; the next one will be at the Wells Fargo Theater at the Autry National Center in Griffith Park in Los Angeles Saturday June 27th, at 1:00 pm. This staged reading is FREE and is a wonderful opportunity to see not only my work but Terry Gomez' Carbon Black and Dawn Dumont's The Fancy Dancer. Carbon Black reads on Friday evening, the 26th at 8:00, and The Fancy Dancer, which also features Kateri Walker, reads at 4:00 on Saturday.
Did I mention the readings are FREE?
Sunday, June 07, 2009
The Frybread Queen reading at La Jolla Playhouse and the Autry National Center
Saturday, June 20, 1:00 p.m., Mandell Weiss Forum Studio, La Jolla Playhouse
Saturday, June 27, 1:00 p.m., Wells Fargo Theater, Autry National Center
The Frybread Queen by Carolyn Dunn (Muskogee Creek, Seminole, Cherokee)
Directed by Scott Horstein
Dramaturgy by Robert Caisley
Three generations of Indian women come together for the funeral of a beloved son. The collision
of personalities forces them to confront long-simmering tensions that threaten to tear them apart.
This quietly poetic drama has all the haunting qualities of a tragicomedy—Navajo
style! A reception follows the reading and discussion.
frybread queen
(between 3-4pm, join us for a reception featuring authentic frybread)
_____
see Native Voices at the Autry's site:
http://www.autrynationalcenter.org/nativevoices/nv_events.php
Saturday, June 27, 1:00 p.m., Wells Fargo Theater, Autry National Center
The Frybread Queen by Carolyn Dunn (Muskogee Creek, Seminole, Cherokee)
Directed by Scott Horstein
Dramaturgy by Robert Caisley
Three generations of Indian women come together for the funeral of a beloved son. The collision
of personalities forces them to confront long-simmering tensions that threaten to tear them apart.
This quietly poetic drama has all the haunting qualities of a tragicomedy—Navajo
style! A reception follows the reading and discussion.
frybread queen
(between 3-4pm, join us for a reception featuring authentic frybread)
_____
see Native Voices at the Autry's site:
http://www.autrynationalcenter.org/nativevoices/nv_events.php
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The Last Light
Twilight
The sun falls behind
The succulence of cloud.
Our coming, our leaving
Another day, another night.
Water sprays
From the crest
Of a fluorite wave.
The head tips slightly
Forward,
Leading the torrent
Of motion
One after the other,
Capping to the shore.
Breaking, as grief
Pushes on ahead.
The last light
Shallows in her absence.
Turning, twisting,
Now just an imprint
Where my feet touched earth.
Trading breath,
Leaves flutter
In the waning day,
Seared by the rising
Breath of heaven.
Like so many before,
So many after,
Who will be here
To sing
When I
Am gone?
© 2009 Carolyn Dunn
The sun falls behind
The succulence of cloud.
Our coming, our leaving
Another day, another night.
Water sprays
From the crest
Of a fluorite wave.
The head tips slightly
Forward,
Leading the torrent
Of motion
One after the other,
Capping to the shore.
Breaking, as grief
Pushes on ahead.
The last light
Shallows in her absence.
Turning, twisting,
Now just an imprint
Where my feet touched earth.
Trading breath,
Leaves flutter
In the waning day,
Seared by the rising
Breath of heaven.
Like so many before,
So many after,
Who will be here
To sing
When I
Am gone?
© 2009 Carolyn Dunn
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
A new Coyote Speaks review...
...from Children's Literature magazine.
Children's Literature
This generously sized and exquisitely presented mix of original poetry, retold traditional stories and linking commentary is an answer from within Native America to two centuries of decontextualized appropriation of story. Of the more than 500 tribes of North America, nearly 50 find expression in this meticulously crafted collection that opens windows onto indigenous traditions while avoiding the pitfalls of essentialism. The stories are contained within chapters focused on medicine people, word magic, creation, the magic of art and artifacts, hero figures, guardians of wild places, trickster and related animal characters, and stories from tribal memories. A final chapter looks forward, addressing mythmaking in the 21st century. Within each content area, however, the lines between story and commentary are gently blurred, so that form and content both reflect societies with story at their heart. Even the introduction begins with brief text that erases distinctions between what we=2 0think of as real and imaginary, then moves through a Cherokee ballgame story and concludes with this reminder: "When we walk the lands of these stories in our imaginations, it is vital to understand that we are guests and need to tread softly." The retellings are simple, vital, fluid and direct, each in a style fitting to the story. Some like the transformation tales are short and pointed. Others like "The Daughter of Sun" span vast periods of mythic time, so we can feel the sweep of the storyteller's prose. Still others such as "Song of the World" (Pima) employ both prose and song. Here the tale moves from its launching in primordial time, through the journey of the first man, and then in a swift one-twoconclusion, arrives right into the reader's here and now: "He picked up the sun and placed it in the sky, and it is still there, just as he made it." Parchment-effect pages showcase the rendering by Berk of selected petroglyphs. The book is additionally enriched by the incorporation of a range of artwork from photographs of southwestern kachinas and bone artifacts from the Arctic, to stunning contemporary art such as Hazel Merritt's iconic painting of a satellite dish with a Navajo wedding basket design on it. As an example of how text and form are perfectly married, the facing page carries a poem titled "Beautyway" that evokes both the Dine ceremony and the troubled ecology and history of the Four Corners region. Back matter contains a list of tribes and nations mentioned in the book, a select bibliography, a note on sources, extensive illustration credits and an index. In all, Coyote Speaks is a gift offered up with a delicate and caring touch, inviting both young readers and adults to explore its pages again and again. Reviewer: Uma Krishnaswami
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Rick Nelson was right, part 2...and Coyote Speaks
Eighteen years ago, when my non-Indian brother-in-law remarried, he told me that the wedding would be in Sedona, Arizona. “We have a native medicine man performing the ceremony- I’m looking forward to you meeting him,” he told me. “You should get along very well.” I assumed that this “getting along very well” would be because we were both native peoples. When we met, the first thing the “medicine man” said to me was “Where did you get that curly hair?” to which I replied, “the same place you got that Spanish last name.”
We have been completely acculturized in this country to think we understand than Native peoples have a certain phenomelogical look, and if we don’t fit under that rubric, then the questions begin. The federal government and other non-Indian entities have been very good at creating division within our communities and we have allowed them to tell us what is Indian and what is not. We have allowed them to tell us what our identity is, and who we are. They have taken our stories, many times, and made them their own. Some have gotten very good at hiding their nativist agenda- their ability to speak for native peoples while asserting their own nativism in this country. It is a dangerous precedence if we are to allow non-natives to tell us what stories belong to whom, and that we, as native people, who are doing the work of reclaiming our songs, our stories, and our languages.
The eighteen year old adventure of my brother-in-law’s wedding in Sedona would continue well past the ceremony itself. As part of a guided tour of Sedona that the “medicine man” made his living giving to non-natives, he began telling stories of place names in the area. I was accompanied on this tour by my dear friend, a Laguna scholar and critic who questioned the authenticity of the place names the self professed “medicine man” was spouting. “Who gave these places these names?” she asked him, to which he replied smugly, “I did.”
The cultural work of repatriation works in many ways. In my own work, I have examined how stories recorded by early anthropologists were written and recorded to reflect the cultural biases of the recorder. (see my article in Ines Hernandez-Avila’s Reading Native American Women: Critical and Creative Representations; see also my introduction to Through the Eye of the Deer, co-written and edited with Carol Comfort). To place an aforementioned oral narrative back into the tribal repertoire is in itself an act of reclaiming that story for that tribe. To place these stories back into the tribal archive and acknowledge the tribe to whom it belongs is to re-gather the story that has been spoken and give credit where credit is due. Is that an exploitation of a culture? If that is so, then one must accuse other native peoples whose work in cultural reclaimation have included Alfonso Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan, among many, many other native writers. Are storytellers such as Gayle Ross, Dovie Thomasen, and Tim Tingle, who have told other peoples’ stories (with utmost care and credit to the original storyteller and the tribe) in performance and in print, exploiting the storytellers and the tribes to whom these stories originate? The danger of taking stories that belong to others, reclassifying them as your own and lending a certain cultural authenticity to these stories is indeed exploiting native peoples and others who come to these stories thinking they will be learning about native peoples. Beverly Slapin’s review of Coyote Speaks does everything she accuses the authors (Ari Berk and myself) of doing: she attempts to synthesize the book and takes short phrases from the book out of context to further her own nativist agenda. She avoids mentioning the book's authors' extensive cultural and scholarly expertise in both the field of American Indian literary studies and in native communities in Indian Country. She further accuses us of making vast generalizations when it comes to native peoples, where we very clearly state in the book, “It is important to remember that there are more than five hundred distinct Native American tribes, with as many languages and cultures.” (p 17). We are careful also to follow the lead of the late scholar and activist Vine Deloria in that any stories still in the oral tradition still reside there. Do we criticize Anna and Jack Kilpatrick for recording traditional Cherokee stories and placing them in a written archive? Do we criticize Alfonso Ortiz for co-authoring a book with Richard Erdoes on native mythology that takes an oral archive and placing in a written one? Do we criticize Rigoberta Menchu for taking the oral narratives she learned as a child and placing it in a children’s book? No, because these texts are preserving an archive that was in danger of being lost at one time. Do we take their written records of these narratives completely out of context to support a so-called “nativist” agenda? The Kilpatricks attempted to record traditional Cherokee narratives exactly the way the original storytellers performed them, to preserve the sense of the oral archive. Does that mean the written version of the story takes away a story’s orality? Does it take away a story’s authenticity because it is now part of a written record for not only the nation from whom it derives but non-natives as well? If we are to follow the logic of Slapin’s argument, then the retelling of any native story infringes upon the rights of native peoples and exploits native peoples in the retelling.
The cultural work of storytelling is to reify a peoples’ history, language, cosmology, in a sense, it is a retelling of that peoples’ origin narratives. To retell these narratives that classifies them as quaint old folktales and genericizes them as simply “a Native American tale” colonizes these tales and becomes a danger to the outside world who doesn’t share the cultural world view of the tribe to whom these tales belong. That is exploiting a people and their stories.
We have been completely acculturized in this country to think we understand than Native peoples have a certain phenomelogical look, and if we don’t fit under that rubric, then the questions begin. The federal government and other non-Indian entities have been very good at creating division within our communities and we have allowed them to tell us what is Indian and what is not. We have allowed them to tell us what our identity is, and who we are. They have taken our stories, many times, and made them their own. Some have gotten very good at hiding their nativist agenda- their ability to speak for native peoples while asserting their own nativism in this country. It is a dangerous precedence if we are to allow non-natives to tell us what stories belong to whom, and that we, as native people, who are doing the work of reclaiming our songs, our stories, and our languages.
The eighteen year old adventure of my brother-in-law’s wedding in Sedona would continue well past the ceremony itself. As part of a guided tour of Sedona that the “medicine man” made his living giving to non-natives, he began telling stories of place names in the area. I was accompanied on this tour by my dear friend, a Laguna scholar and critic who questioned the authenticity of the place names the self professed “medicine man” was spouting. “Who gave these places these names?” she asked him, to which he replied smugly, “I did.”
The cultural work of repatriation works in many ways. In my own work, I have examined how stories recorded by early anthropologists were written and recorded to reflect the cultural biases of the recorder. (see my article in Ines Hernandez-Avila’s Reading Native American Women: Critical and Creative Representations; see also my introduction to Through the Eye of the Deer, co-written and edited with Carol Comfort). To place an aforementioned oral narrative back into the tribal repertoire is in itself an act of reclaiming that story for that tribe. To place these stories back into the tribal archive and acknowledge the tribe to whom it belongs is to re-gather the story that has been spoken and give credit where credit is due. Is that an exploitation of a culture? If that is so, then one must accuse other native peoples whose work in cultural reclaimation have included Alfonso Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan, among many, many other native writers. Are storytellers such as Gayle Ross, Dovie Thomasen, and Tim Tingle, who have told other peoples’ stories (with utmost care and credit to the original storyteller and the tribe) in performance and in print, exploiting the storytellers and the tribes to whom these stories originate? The danger of taking stories that belong to others, reclassifying them as your own and lending a certain cultural authenticity to these stories is indeed exploiting native peoples and others who come to these stories thinking they will be learning about native peoples. Beverly Slapin’s review of Coyote Speaks does everything she accuses the authors (Ari Berk and myself) of doing: she attempts to synthesize the book and takes short phrases from the book out of context to further her own nativist agenda. She avoids mentioning the book's authors' extensive cultural and scholarly expertise in both the field of American Indian literary studies and in native communities in Indian Country. She further accuses us of making vast generalizations when it comes to native peoples, where we very clearly state in the book, “It is important to remember that there are more than five hundred distinct Native American tribes, with as many languages and cultures.” (p 17). We are careful also to follow the lead of the late scholar and activist Vine Deloria in that any stories still in the oral tradition still reside there. Do we criticize Anna and Jack Kilpatrick for recording traditional Cherokee stories and placing them in a written archive? Do we criticize Alfonso Ortiz for co-authoring a book with Richard Erdoes on native mythology that takes an oral archive and placing in a written one? Do we criticize Rigoberta Menchu for taking the oral narratives she learned as a child and placing it in a children’s book? No, because these texts are preserving an archive that was in danger of being lost at one time. Do we take their written records of these narratives completely out of context to support a so-called “nativist” agenda? The Kilpatricks attempted to record traditional Cherokee narratives exactly the way the original storytellers performed them, to preserve the sense of the oral archive. Does that mean the written version of the story takes away a story’s orality? Does it take away a story’s authenticity because it is now part of a written record for not only the nation from whom it derives but non-natives as well? If we are to follow the logic of Slapin’s argument, then the retelling of any native story infringes upon the rights of native peoples and exploits native peoples in the retelling.
The cultural work of storytelling is to reify a peoples’ history, language, cosmology, in a sense, it is a retelling of that peoples’ origin narratives. To retell these narratives that classifies them as quaint old folktales and genericizes them as simply “a Native American tale” colonizes these tales and becomes a danger to the outside world who doesn’t share the cultural world view of the tribe to whom these tales belong. That is exploiting a people and their stories.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
I Met an old Woman
I met an old woman
who looked beyond
the years of living,
scattered among stones,
grain,
and living between
ashes, reeds,
forgotten things.
She took my hand
in hers.
bebe, bebe,
she whispered, then I
was standing under
a splash of stars
spreading from a center
of the womb
of hidden and swollen
satrs.
In her touch,
she displaced
memory rooted
and routed along
a trail of tears,
from which
spring roses
born of thorns
and deep red bloom.
Survival is this,
she said,
biology speaking a language
unspoken by stars
whose light
has long gone
back to the exploding
dome of the sky.
Entrails
of light, each
seeping into
new and wet
beings and blessing.
We can trace the trajectory
of a spark, of birth
of life, of death.
Here it ends
when it begins.
Bebe, she smiles,
you look so like my own.
A motherless child
sees oceans of stars
in her eyes,
laced within
the shining sorrow
of a long foreshadowed
unfolding prayer.
Albuquerque
10-16-08
