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Staging Coyote's Dream #2
Staging Coyote's Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English, Volume II
This second volume of Staging Coyote's Dream is an all-new anthology of First Nations drama in English that follows up on the success of the first volume. It beings together plays by some of the leading Native playwrights in North America, some of which have not been previously published. Like its predecessor it will be required reading for specialists and students of Native Studies, Native theatre or literature, and will serve as an outstanding introduction for newcomers to the field.
Includes Path With No Moccasins, The Indian Medicine Shows, More Than Feathers and Beads, Annie Mae’s Movement, Trail of the Otter, Governor of the Dew: A Memorial to Nostalgia and Desire, Confessions of an Indian Cowboy, Burning Vision, Please Do Not Touch the Indians, and The Scrubbing Project.
Includes Path With No Moccasins, The Indian Medicine Shows, More Than Feathers and Beads, Annie Mae’s Movement, Trail of the Otter, Governor of the Dew: A Memorial to Nostalgia and Desire, Confessions of an Indian Cowboy, Burning Vision, Please Do Not Touch the Indians, and The Scrubbing Project.
369 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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February 14, 2026
I think Volume II of Staging Coyote's Dream is even better than Volume I. This anthology contains ten plays by Native authors, including many published for the first time. It's a formally diverse collection, including realist drama, ritual performance, solo shows, comedy, and Epic Brechtian documentary.
Shirley Cheechoo’s Path with No Moccasins (1991) is a powerful one-person show about growing up away from family at a residential school. This is a show designed as medicine, to purge the poison from childhood and deal with the residual anger and justified bitterness, to mourn Cheechoo’s father who has passed, and to turn her attention toward the future, toward her son and husband, and toward sharing healing energy with the world as a whole.
The Indian Medicine Shows (1996) is a combination of two insanely good one-act plays by Daniel David Moses: The Moon and Dead Indians and Angel of the Medicine Show . As usual for his work, Moses’s plays are poetic and powerful, and he has a brilliant way of not only offering audiences superb dialogue that feels both abstract and realistic at the same time but also giving us theatrical surprises. Both one-acts have shocking, splendid twists that take the audience by surprise. These plays also have a troubling queer man at their center, and Moses’s portrayal of queerness in nineteenth-century New Mexico works to analyze the desire and homophobia that was so fundamental to settler colonialism in the Americas. This is a brilliant piece of work.
Murielle Borst’s More than Feathers and Beads (1996) is a one-woman show that offers different images of contemporary Native women, especially inflected with pop culture—Pulp Fiction, Platoon, Wham!, Reagan, etc. This is also, like many of the plays from the period, in many ways about AIDS and its effects on Native communities.
Yvette Nolan’s Annie Mae’s Movement (1998/2006) is an excellent documentary play about Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Mik’maq woman who worked with MIA and was murdered in 1975—possibly by the FBI, but possibly also by internal agents on information from the FBI. In any case Nolan’s play delves deeply into both Anna Mae’s own perspective on the movement, the place of women within Native political organizing, the infiltration work of the Federal government and their effects on civil rights organizations, and state violence. One of the stunning moments in the play is a comparison Nolan makes between political kidnappings in South and Central America—desaparecidos—and disappeared Indigenous women in North America. This play is really, really good, with an extraordinary theatricality to it.
Another one-woman show, Muriel Miguel’s Trail of the Otter (1996), was created with Floyd Favel, Leota Lone Dog, and Deborah Ratelle. This is a piece about queer desire that reimagines two-spirit people through the otter.
Floyd Favel’s own Governor of the Dew: a Memorial to Nostalgia and Desire (1997) uses a mythical story of a beaver falling in love with a beautiful woman to think about colonialism and (perhaps also) queer desire. What I love especially about Favel’s play is that more than anything else it’s about connection and forgiveness among native people, as well as the power of sharing stories, listening, and eat and drinking together as guests and hosts.
Margo Kane’s Confessions of an Indian Cowboy (1998) is the anthology’s final one-person show. This one is about Métis identity and, especially about growing up straddling worlds. Kane cycles through characters and tells stories that take us through a story of finding oneself despite being pulled in multiple directions.
Marie Clements’ Burning Vision (2003) is wonderfully theatrical and very, very smart. I loved this so much. This is a play about radium mining and its use in products that was used to kill so many people. In Clements’ typically brilliant formal style, Burning Vision is filled with memorable characters, dreams, visions, and anthropomorphized objects. It’s so good. This anthology is filled with amazing writing, but I think Clements’ play tops the list.
Please Do Not Touch the Indians (2004) seems like a play that was written explicitly (by Joseph Dandurand) for the Museum of the American West in Southern California’s Griffith Park. It fits perfectly as a piece that explores the colonial gaze and how to live under it. Please Do Not Touch the Indians works like a kind of series of Beckettian vignettes that take us through time as we explore different ways that tourists/visitors/moviegoers have looked at Native people. Especially powerful, though, are the ways Dandurand explores the play’s spirit figures—raven, wolf, coyote—and the way they live on despite the violence of colonialism.
Finally, The Scrubbing Project (2002/2006) by Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble (Jani Lauzon, Monique Mojica, Michelle St. John) is a vaudeville-comedy ritual performance filled with testimony and laughs. It’s a deeply complex play in which the performers alternate between talking about genocide, reenacting scenes of skin-color related trauma, performing as the Marx Brothers, and singing vaudeville ditties. It’s kind of marvelous.
Shirley Cheechoo’s Path with No Moccasins (1991) is a powerful one-person show about growing up away from family at a residential school. This is a show designed as medicine, to purge the poison from childhood and deal with the residual anger and justified bitterness, to mourn Cheechoo’s father who has passed, and to turn her attention toward the future, toward her son and husband, and toward sharing healing energy with the world as a whole.
The Indian Medicine Shows (1996) is a combination of two insanely good one-act plays by Daniel David Moses: The Moon and Dead Indians and Angel of the Medicine Show . As usual for his work, Moses’s plays are poetic and powerful, and he has a brilliant way of not only offering audiences superb dialogue that feels both abstract and realistic at the same time but also giving us theatrical surprises. Both one-acts have shocking, splendid twists that take the audience by surprise. These plays also have a troubling queer man at their center, and Moses’s portrayal of queerness in nineteenth-century New Mexico works to analyze the desire and homophobia that was so fundamental to settler colonialism in the Americas. This is a brilliant piece of work.
Murielle Borst’s More than Feathers and Beads (1996) is a one-woman show that offers different images of contemporary Native women, especially inflected with pop culture—Pulp Fiction, Platoon, Wham!, Reagan, etc. This is also, like many of the plays from the period, in many ways about AIDS and its effects on Native communities.
Yvette Nolan’s Annie Mae’s Movement (1998/2006) is an excellent documentary play about Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Mik’maq woman who worked with MIA and was murdered in 1975—possibly by the FBI, but possibly also by internal agents on information from the FBI. In any case Nolan’s play delves deeply into both Anna Mae’s own perspective on the movement, the place of women within Native political organizing, the infiltration work of the Federal government and their effects on civil rights organizations, and state violence. One of the stunning moments in the play is a comparison Nolan makes between political kidnappings in South and Central America—desaparecidos—and disappeared Indigenous women in North America. This play is really, really good, with an extraordinary theatricality to it.
Another one-woman show, Muriel Miguel’s Trail of the Otter (1996), was created with Floyd Favel, Leota Lone Dog, and Deborah Ratelle. This is a piece about queer desire that reimagines two-spirit people through the otter.
Floyd Favel’s own Governor of the Dew: a Memorial to Nostalgia and Desire (1997) uses a mythical story of a beaver falling in love with a beautiful woman to think about colonialism and (perhaps also) queer desire. What I love especially about Favel’s play is that more than anything else it’s about connection and forgiveness among native people, as well as the power of sharing stories, listening, and eat and drinking together as guests and hosts.
Margo Kane’s Confessions of an Indian Cowboy (1998) is the anthology’s final one-person show. This one is about Métis identity and, especially about growing up straddling worlds. Kane cycles through characters and tells stories that take us through a story of finding oneself despite being pulled in multiple directions.
Marie Clements’ Burning Vision (2003) is wonderfully theatrical and very, very smart. I loved this so much. This is a play about radium mining and its use in products that was used to kill so many people. In Clements’ typically brilliant formal style, Burning Vision is filled with memorable characters, dreams, visions, and anthropomorphized objects. It’s so good. This anthology is filled with amazing writing, but I think Clements’ play tops the list.
Please Do Not Touch the Indians (2004) seems like a play that was written explicitly (by Joseph Dandurand) for the Museum of the American West in Southern California’s Griffith Park. It fits perfectly as a piece that explores the colonial gaze and how to live under it. Please Do Not Touch the Indians works like a kind of series of Beckettian vignettes that take us through time as we explore different ways that tourists/visitors/moviegoers have looked at Native people. Especially powerful, though, are the ways Dandurand explores the play’s spirit figures—raven, wolf, coyote—and the way they live on despite the violence of colonialism.
Finally, The Scrubbing Project (2002/2006) by Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble (Jani Lauzon, Monique Mojica, Michelle St. John) is a vaudeville-comedy ritual performance filled with testimony and laughs. It’s a deeply complex play in which the performers alternate between talking about genocide, reenacting scenes of skin-color related trauma, performing as the Marx Brothers, and singing vaudeville ditties. It’s kind of marvelous.
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