What do you think?
Rate this book
Staging Coyote's Dream #1
Staging Coyote's Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English
The first anthology of First Nations drama to be published in Canada, this volume includes seminal work by Spiderwoman Theatre, Daniel David Moses, Monique Mojica, Drew Hayden Taylor, Yvette Nolan, and Marie Humber Clements, and features previously unpublished plays by Tomson Highway, Maria Campbell, Floyd Favel Starr, and William Yellow Robe, Jr.
459 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2002
27 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 2, 2025
This is a pretty wonderful anthology. It includes nine plays by Indigenous playwrights, including some of the most important Native writers working in the theatre today.
William S. Yellow Robe Jr.'s The Independence of Eddie Rose is a very difficult kitchen-sink/family drama about a teenage boy dealing with a drunk and abusive mother, her sexually abusive boyfriend, and the "criminal justice" system. This is realism, and it's not an easy read. Yellow Robe's play is attempting to talk about important social issues and so he's used a form designed for this purpose. Eddie Rose is not an easy play, but it works well, it's dramatically interesting, and it has some great parts.
Tomson Highway's Aria, Spiderwoman Theater's Reverb-ber-ber-rations, and Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots are ritual dramas about the roles that Native women are forced to play and legacies they carry with them. These dramas take different tactics. Mojica's play, for example, is about the idea of interracial relationships and uses the images of Malintzin and Pocahontas, to discuss modern mestizo identities such as Mexican and Métis. Reverb-ber-ber-rations is more about memories and humor, sisterhood, and protection. It's a drumming ritual, but it's also funny and passionate.
Daniel David Moses's Almighty Voice and His Wife is, I think, the most well known play in the anthology. It's a classic: a poetic symbolic, ritual exploration of the place of First Nations people in the world. It's about race, ghosts, love, and modernity.
Yvette Nolan's Job's Wife, or The Delivery of Grace is a beautiful ritual drama about a young white woman giving birth to the child of a Native man. Her prayers are answered by a god—who calls himself Josh—and the two re-enact a series of questions about the baby she's having while the spirit of the child itself is also present onstage. It's so good.
Floyd Favel's Lady of Silences, like most of the plays in the anthology, is a ritual drama. This one is loosely based on Genet's The Blacks, and it involves a kind of ritual reperformance of the murder of a white woman by three Native women. This play is tough, with most of its characters being unlikable and selfish. The play still works excellently, it's just not a very enjoyable drama.
I feel very differently about Drew Hayden Taylor's Girl Who Loved Her Horses, though. This is an intriguing kind of memory play, where we operate in two different times. The play is about making art—about the process of making art and why people want to do it—but it is also about learning to love one another and have mercy and compassion for others. It is often said that kids are cruel, but Taylor's play makes a different kind of offering, one that proposes that kids might be able to see something special in one another and bring that out if they listen well enough. I absolutely loved this play. It has an amazing sense of theatricality, and it's filled with hope.
Finally, there's The Unnatural and Accidental Women. In her uncanny, unique style, Marie Clements approaches the murders of ten Indigenous women in the Canadian west. This is a deeply mysterious play that struggles with a desire to live, deep grief, sadness, and longing. It's a dream-vision of a play, following a surreal logic and a search through memory, connecting women across generations and across families—but connecting them through loss and longing, the need to be loved. It's also a scary show (it is, after all, about a series of murders), but one always feels in secure hands with Clements' writing. One thing I absolutely adore about Clements' work is that, although it is usual for a piece of theatre to make things make sense, to explain the mystery at the center of the drama, Clements is committed to the mystery of existence as such. Our desires, our heartbreaks, our need for something from our parents: these things are themselves mysterious, as mysterious and confounding in their own way as why this man murdered ten women. The Unnatural and Accidental Women no more claims to explain this serial murderer than it claims to explain what it's like to be depressed.
William S. Yellow Robe Jr.'s The Independence of Eddie Rose is a very difficult kitchen-sink/family drama about a teenage boy dealing with a drunk and abusive mother, her sexually abusive boyfriend, and the "criminal justice" system. This is realism, and it's not an easy read. Yellow Robe's play is attempting to talk about important social issues and so he's used a form designed for this purpose. Eddie Rose is not an easy play, but it works well, it's dramatically interesting, and it has some great parts.
Tomson Highway's Aria, Spiderwoman Theater's Reverb-ber-ber-rations, and Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots are ritual dramas about the roles that Native women are forced to play and legacies they carry with them. These dramas take different tactics. Mojica's play, for example, is about the idea of interracial relationships and uses the images of Malintzin and Pocahontas, to discuss modern mestizo identities such as Mexican and Métis. Reverb-ber-ber-rations is more about memories and humor, sisterhood, and protection. It's a drumming ritual, but it's also funny and passionate.
Daniel David Moses's Almighty Voice and His Wife is, I think, the most well known play in the anthology. It's a classic: a poetic symbolic, ritual exploration of the place of First Nations people in the world. It's about race, ghosts, love, and modernity.
Yvette Nolan's Job's Wife, or The Delivery of Grace is a beautiful ritual drama about a young white woman giving birth to the child of a Native man. Her prayers are answered by a god—who calls himself Josh—and the two re-enact a series of questions about the baby she's having while the spirit of the child itself is also present onstage. It's so good.
Floyd Favel's Lady of Silences, like most of the plays in the anthology, is a ritual drama. This one is loosely based on Genet's The Blacks, and it involves a kind of ritual reperformance of the murder of a white woman by three Native women. This play is tough, with most of its characters being unlikable and selfish. The play still works excellently, it's just not a very enjoyable drama.
I feel very differently about Drew Hayden Taylor's Girl Who Loved Her Horses, though. This is an intriguing kind of memory play, where we operate in two different times. The play is about making art—about the process of making art and why people want to do it—but it is also about learning to love one another and have mercy and compassion for others. It is often said that kids are cruel, but Taylor's play makes a different kind of offering, one that proposes that kids might be able to see something special in one another and bring that out if they listen well enough. I absolutely loved this play. It has an amazing sense of theatricality, and it's filled with hope.
Finally, there's The Unnatural and Accidental Women. In her uncanny, unique style, Marie Clements approaches the murders of ten Indigenous women in the Canadian west. This is a deeply mysterious play that struggles with a desire to live, deep grief, sadness, and longing. It's a dream-vision of a play, following a surreal logic and a search through memory, connecting women across generations and across families—but connecting them through loss and longing, the need to be loved. It's also a scary show (it is, after all, about a series of murders), but one always feels in secure hands with Clements' writing. One thing I absolutely adore about Clements' work is that, although it is usual for a piece of theatre to make things make sense, to explain the mystery at the center of the drama, Clements is committed to the mystery of existence as such. Our desires, our heartbreaks, our need for something from our parents: these things are themselves mysterious, as mysterious and confounding in their own way as why this man murdered ten women. The Unnatural and Accidental Women no more claims to explain this serial murderer than it claims to explain what it's like to be depressed.
July 22, 2021
The Independence of Eddie Rose, by William S. Yellow Robe Jr.: This is a realist play, in which there are a lot of difficult events, including pervasive alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, sexual abuse in a prison, the rape of a child, etc. But it's also a play that has a hopeful aspect, as young Eddie Rose is re-introduced to the rituals and traditions of his people, which offer him a kind of dignity and humanity that the world of settler society denies. And it's significant that Eddie's aunt Thelma is the one who re-introduces these traditions because in many Native American and First Nations cultures women are central guardians of tradition and ritual.
https://youtu.be/AfVRkHjJl-I
Aria, by Tomson Highway: I'm really not that into one person shows, and this is a one person show divided into a bunch of short monologues. I suppose it's a kind of impressionist technique for creating an overarching picture, but I couldn't get into the play.
Reverb-ber-ber-rations, by Spiderwoman Theater: The big theme of this play is returning to a form of spirituality rooted in Indigenous practices and communities. The two main ways the play approaches this are through repetitions and through storytelling involving positive motion toward spiritual interconnectedness. There is both repetition of individual lines or words--sometimes suggesting a chant or ritual--as well as repetitions of scenes with slight variations. This kind of echoing technique represents a return to the past to renegotiate and rethink previous experiences and actions, an opportunity to do things differently but also a symbol of the interconnectedness of experience. The repetitions reflect cycles--of nature, of life, etc. The other component of the play is storytelling. The structure of the stories tends to reflect a movement from watching or being detached to participating and being immersed. For instance, one scene recounts attending a corn dance in New Mexico. Initially, the speaker (parts of the story are told by each of the three sisters who make up Spiderwoman Theater) stands on the sidelines with the tourists, but gradually she begins to feel the rhythm of the dance, then has visions of spirits (particularly her father) encouraging her to join the dance, then she begins to sway, then a medicine man brings her into the dance, and finally she embraces the dance and her Indigenous heritage.
https://youtu.be/10HujLPwr0A
Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, by Monique Mojica: This is a brilliant play that explores the challenges of Indigenous Resurgence from the perspective of Indigenous women, recognizing their particular struggles, identifying shared experiences, lampooning stereotypes and mythologizing, and promoting a fundamental unity. Mojica draws on several stereotypes and cultural myths of Native American women, particularly the mythologized version of Pocahontas, along with broader stereotypes about Native women--this is the satiric element of the play, because Mojica ridicules these images by presenting them as absurd, by making them over-the-top. However, the play also deals seriously with themes like sexual violence, enforced prostitution, alcoholism, and cultural genocide. But as Mojica deals with these dark themes, the play always resonates with the power of women to survive and to overcome through power and tradition. Even when Indigenous men let them down, when (white) feminism does not account for their experiences, Indigenous women continue to survive and to maintain their traditions, maintain their nations (even if only in their hearts).
https://youtu.be/MZQJXP-yYPM
Almighty Voice and His Wife, by Daniel David Moses: This is a play of two halves, with the first half a fairly realistic historical drama and the second half a tongue-in-cheek satire of traditional US and Canadian representations of Indigenous North Americans. The first act recounts the story of Almighty Voice (Kisse-Manitou-Wayou in Cree) who in 1895 killed a cow owned by the Canadian government and after escaping jail began a kind of mini-rebellion as a fugitive, eventually being killed by the Mounties. Moses' focus is largely on Almighty Voice's relationship with his wife White Girl, and their attempts to build a normal, healthy relationship under the cultural, judicial, and physical violence of settler colonialism. The second half of the play switches to a kind of ghostly Medicine/Variety show, where the Ghost (of Almighty Voice) and the Interlocutor put on stereotypical "Indian" performances, sing songs, do short plays, and engage in rapid comic banter.
https://youtu.be/13FOZgNijyY
Job's Wife: or the Delivery of Grace, by Yvette Nolan: Nolan is one of my favorite playwrights, and this is a great short play. Grace is a white woman in a relationship with an Indigenous man, and when she gets pregnant she prays for help. The God who shows up--who goes by the name Josh--isn't precisely what she expected, in that he's Native. Josh challenges Grace about her desire for the baby, and about the troubles the pregnancy has caused in her relationships with her parents (who don't approve because she's unmarried and in a relationship with Paul, an Indigenous man) and with Paul (who doesn't necessarily want a baby, and to whom Grace lied when she said she hadn't tried to get pregnant). Josh--who is listed in the script as HIM--takes on these various roles to play out the scenes of Grace's interactions with her father and with Paul, and he also appears as himself to challenge her limited, European-inflected view of God and to push her to be honest with herself about her own ambivalence regarding the pregnancy.
https://youtu.be/SPHkat1tIBU
Lady of Silences, by Floyd Favel: This is a really good play about a First Nations man named Village, who is in purgatory with three First Nations women--Ruth, Sheila, and Lisa--whom Village had abandoned to have a relationship with a white woman. Ruth, Sheila, and Lisa then subsequently murdered the woman outside a bar. In this purgatory, which seems to be run by the detective who worked on the case (this is a bit like the butler in Sartre's No Exit, in that he seems to be more or less in charge of their afterlife tribulations, but those tribulations largely takes the form of Village and the women working on each other), Village needs to reenact his relationship with the white woman until he comes to a genuine understanding of the self-loathing that drove him to pursue her; if he fails to resolve his issues, he's apparently going to hell. And the women need to replay their relationships with Village and the murder of the white woman until they come to terms with what they've done. It's especially interesting because I think this individual white woman stands in for the larger white settler culture, which Indigenous people have been trained (through residential schools, but even today through "mainstream" Canadian culture and ideology) to desire to emulate or to have--and the Indigenous women in this play do admit that they wanted to be white, as does Village. Both the romantic relationship and the murder are symbolic attempts to possess or to destroy the whiteness that is often figured as superior to Indigenous people and culture in Canada.
https://youtu.be/NjhdmejFRHg
Girl Who Loved Her Horses, by Drew Hayden Taylor: This is a children's play, which normally I don't read (not that I have anything against them, I just don't normally gravitate to children's or YA lit), but this is an extremely good play. I like all the plays I've read by Taylor. Essentially there are two interconnected plot lines here: one centers on a group of friends, Ralph and Shelley (brother and sister) and William, and the other centers on an extremely shy girl named Danielle. Danielle lives with her alcoholic mother and the mom's abusive boyfriend, and she is constantly terrified and socially anxious. But this image of a horse comes to her to comfort her, born out of a memory from when her father took her to a fair to ride a sad pony. Danielle began to imagine the pony filled with life, joy, and power--and that image became almost like a security blanket. When Danielle learns that Ralph and Shelley's mom is letting the kinds draw on their wall, Danielle comes over and draws an amazing picture of the horse, which is the first time the other kids really notice her. As they get to know Danielle a little bit, they become extremely concerned about her home life, and when Danielle goes missing for several days, the kids become extremely worried. William, who was mean to Danielle because he was jealous of her ability to draw the magnificent horse, redeems himself by finding her and leading Ralph and Shelley to her, where they all reconcile. But then Danielle's mom's boyfriend gets a job in Toronto and takes Danielle away (though Ralph and Shelley's mom tries to adopt Danielle to get her out of that family). The play ends with a return to where it began, with adult versions of Ralph, Shelley, and William. Ralph has found a mural of the horse, and the three friends decide they're going to find Danielle again.
https://youtu.be/CPfqpiFTjE4
https://youtu.be/AfVRkHjJl-I
Aria, by Tomson Highway: I'm really not that into one person shows, and this is a one person show divided into a bunch of short monologues. I suppose it's a kind of impressionist technique for creating an overarching picture, but I couldn't get into the play.
Reverb-ber-ber-rations, by Spiderwoman Theater: The big theme of this play is returning to a form of spirituality rooted in Indigenous practices and communities. The two main ways the play approaches this are through repetitions and through storytelling involving positive motion toward spiritual interconnectedness. There is both repetition of individual lines or words--sometimes suggesting a chant or ritual--as well as repetitions of scenes with slight variations. This kind of echoing technique represents a return to the past to renegotiate and rethink previous experiences and actions, an opportunity to do things differently but also a symbol of the interconnectedness of experience. The repetitions reflect cycles--of nature, of life, etc. The other component of the play is storytelling. The structure of the stories tends to reflect a movement from watching or being detached to participating and being immersed. For instance, one scene recounts attending a corn dance in New Mexico. Initially, the speaker (parts of the story are told by each of the three sisters who make up Spiderwoman Theater) stands on the sidelines with the tourists, but gradually she begins to feel the rhythm of the dance, then has visions of spirits (particularly her father) encouraging her to join the dance, then she begins to sway, then a medicine man brings her into the dance, and finally she embraces the dance and her Indigenous heritage.
https://youtu.be/10HujLPwr0A
Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, by Monique Mojica: This is a brilliant play that explores the challenges of Indigenous Resurgence from the perspective of Indigenous women, recognizing their particular struggles, identifying shared experiences, lampooning stereotypes and mythologizing, and promoting a fundamental unity. Mojica draws on several stereotypes and cultural myths of Native American women, particularly the mythologized version of Pocahontas, along with broader stereotypes about Native women--this is the satiric element of the play, because Mojica ridicules these images by presenting them as absurd, by making them over-the-top. However, the play also deals seriously with themes like sexual violence, enforced prostitution, alcoholism, and cultural genocide. But as Mojica deals with these dark themes, the play always resonates with the power of women to survive and to overcome through power and tradition. Even when Indigenous men let them down, when (white) feminism does not account for their experiences, Indigenous women continue to survive and to maintain their traditions, maintain their nations (even if only in their hearts).
https://youtu.be/MZQJXP-yYPM
Almighty Voice and His Wife, by Daniel David Moses: This is a play of two halves, with the first half a fairly realistic historical drama and the second half a tongue-in-cheek satire of traditional US and Canadian representations of Indigenous North Americans. The first act recounts the story of Almighty Voice (Kisse-Manitou-Wayou in Cree) who in 1895 killed a cow owned by the Canadian government and after escaping jail began a kind of mini-rebellion as a fugitive, eventually being killed by the Mounties. Moses' focus is largely on Almighty Voice's relationship with his wife White Girl, and their attempts to build a normal, healthy relationship under the cultural, judicial, and physical violence of settler colonialism. The second half of the play switches to a kind of ghostly Medicine/Variety show, where the Ghost (of Almighty Voice) and the Interlocutor put on stereotypical "Indian" performances, sing songs, do short plays, and engage in rapid comic banter.
https://youtu.be/13FOZgNijyY
Job's Wife: or the Delivery of Grace, by Yvette Nolan: Nolan is one of my favorite playwrights, and this is a great short play. Grace is a white woman in a relationship with an Indigenous man, and when she gets pregnant she prays for help. The God who shows up--who goes by the name Josh--isn't precisely what she expected, in that he's Native. Josh challenges Grace about her desire for the baby, and about the troubles the pregnancy has caused in her relationships with her parents (who don't approve because she's unmarried and in a relationship with Paul, an Indigenous man) and with Paul (who doesn't necessarily want a baby, and to whom Grace lied when she said she hadn't tried to get pregnant). Josh--who is listed in the script as HIM--takes on these various roles to play out the scenes of Grace's interactions with her father and with Paul, and he also appears as himself to challenge her limited, European-inflected view of God and to push her to be honest with herself about her own ambivalence regarding the pregnancy.
https://youtu.be/SPHkat1tIBU
Lady of Silences, by Floyd Favel: This is a really good play about a First Nations man named Village, who is in purgatory with three First Nations women--Ruth, Sheila, and Lisa--whom Village had abandoned to have a relationship with a white woman. Ruth, Sheila, and Lisa then subsequently murdered the woman outside a bar. In this purgatory, which seems to be run by the detective who worked on the case (this is a bit like the butler in Sartre's No Exit, in that he seems to be more or less in charge of their afterlife tribulations, but those tribulations largely takes the form of Village and the women working on each other), Village needs to reenact his relationship with the white woman until he comes to a genuine understanding of the self-loathing that drove him to pursue her; if he fails to resolve his issues, he's apparently going to hell. And the women need to replay their relationships with Village and the murder of the white woman until they come to terms with what they've done. It's especially interesting because I think this individual white woman stands in for the larger white settler culture, which Indigenous people have been trained (through residential schools, but even today through "mainstream" Canadian culture and ideology) to desire to emulate or to have--and the Indigenous women in this play do admit that they wanted to be white, as does Village. Both the romantic relationship and the murder are symbolic attempts to possess or to destroy the whiteness that is often figured as superior to Indigenous people and culture in Canada.
https://youtu.be/NjhdmejFRHg
Girl Who Loved Her Horses, by Drew Hayden Taylor: This is a children's play, which normally I don't read (not that I have anything against them, I just don't normally gravitate to children's or YA lit), but this is an extremely good play. I like all the plays I've read by Taylor. Essentially there are two interconnected plot lines here: one centers on a group of friends, Ralph and Shelley (brother and sister) and William, and the other centers on an extremely shy girl named Danielle. Danielle lives with her alcoholic mother and the mom's abusive boyfriend, and she is constantly terrified and socially anxious. But this image of a horse comes to her to comfort her, born out of a memory from when her father took her to a fair to ride a sad pony. Danielle began to imagine the pony filled with life, joy, and power--and that image became almost like a security blanket. When Danielle learns that Ralph and Shelley's mom is letting the kinds draw on their wall, Danielle comes over and draws an amazing picture of the horse, which is the first time the other kids really notice her. As they get to know Danielle a little bit, they become extremely concerned about her home life, and when Danielle goes missing for several days, the kids become extremely worried. William, who was mean to Danielle because he was jealous of her ability to draw the magnificent horse, redeems himself by finding her and leading Ralph and Shelley to her, where they all reconcile. But then Danielle's mom's boyfriend gets a job in Toronto and takes Danielle away (though Ralph and Shelley's mom tries to adopt Danielle to get her out of that family). The play ends with a return to where it began, with adult versions of Ralph, Shelley, and William. Ralph has found a mural of the horse, and the three friends decide they're going to find Danielle again.
https://youtu.be/CPfqpiFTjE4
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews