Centering Relationships to Grow Guthrie Theater’s Native Advisory Council

This doesn’t mean all the Native people who came to Constitution felt good. Some let us know how painful it was to sit in the audience of mostly non-Native people at this particular show. No matter what Adrienne and Oliver did to tweak the language, the play was not written by an Indigenous writer or for an explicitly Indigenous audience. Our mutual commitments to each other allowed for Native audience members to share their experience and for the Guthrie staff to listen. Because Constitution wasn’t the first, last, or only time Indigenous community members were partnering with the Guthrie, we could hold disappointment and respond to what we learned. By staying in the room together and being honest, we could grow trust.

A regional theatre belongs to the people of that region, beginning with the people who have ancestrally been here longer than anyone else.

Meanwhile, Ernest kept teaching classes, on Zoom and then eventually in person. Other Native theatre artists taught as well—Marisa Carr, Marcie Rendon, and Sam Aros Mitchell. We added a new member to the NAC, Mike Swan from three hours away in Pine Point. He brought thirty young people to see The Tempest with support from White Earth Nation and the Guthrie. NAC members Isabella Star LaBlanc and Roya Taylor consulted on the development of Karen Zacarias’s world premiere Shane, which led to a pivotal Native character being written into the show. The Guthrie hired Roya to record the lobby announcements for the whole season and she became the voice of the Guthrie, except crucially for the land acknowledgement, which we understood was always something the Guthrie should give. Most significantly, the seven members of the NAC kept meeting monthly, staying connected to each other and to the promise that a regional theatre belongs to the people of that region, beginning with the people who have ancestrally been here longer than anyone else.

During all those years, we were also collaborating with Ty Defoe and Larissa FastHorse to make a beautiful play about, by, and for the Native community in the Twin Cities called For the People. When For the People premiered at the Guthrie in October of 2023 it made history in all kinds of ways, notably as the first play written and performed by Native artists in the Guthrie’s sixty-year history. Commissioned by the Guthrie through a grant from the Joyce Foundation, Ty and Larissa used a community-driven process to write much of the show, which also makes it one of the very few plays commissioned by a large regional theatre through a community engagement process that ended up having a fully produced run in a mainstage subscriber season.

What is a relationship but a continuous opportunity to think of someone and have them think of you, to change your behavior because it would make them happy, to open the doors wider so that the people you love—and the people they love and all the people who love them—know they can come inside and mingle by the coffee pot?

Most of the articles about For the People mention the “community engagement” process, calling out the talking circles we organized throughout the development period. As the community engagement (CE) director at the Guthrie from 2019-2023, I always feel like this is only a whisper of what was actually going on.

The talking circles would not have been possible without any of these other relationships, commitments, or shared learnings. So often those working in the regional theatre are looking at the plays as an eight-week or year-long commitment to a “topic” or a “theme,” but our practice is relational and good relationships are forever. We are allowed to tell each other’s stories because of our commitment to each other, otherwise it’s hollow, transactional, and damaging. What is a relationship but a continuous opportunity to think of someone and have them think of you, to change your behavior because it would make them happy, to open the doors wider so that the people you love—and the people they love and all the people who love them—know they can come inside and mingle by the coffee pot? Building welcome doesn’t come from one play or one story circle or one class. We authentically become part of each other’s lives by understanding “community” to be a verb.

I left the Guthrie in 2023 to move back home to Rhode Island to steward work for the City of Providence’s Department of Art, Culture and Tourism, before For the People went into production. I left the work of community engagement at the Guthrie in the hands of the CE associate Blossom Johnson, the incoming CE director Amanda White, and the Guthrie staff, the Native Advisory Council, and the community itself.

When I came back to see the show in November of 2023, I happened to be there on the same day Lieutenant (Lt) Governor Peggy Flanagan declared it “For the People Day” and named the work as integral Minnesota culture. The theatre was packed with all kinds of people—notably more Native people than I had ever seen at a season subscriber show. Though the room was loving and warm, while the Lt Governor gave her speech an audience member interrupted from the back, naming wrongs happening to their Indigenous community that the government was ignoring. It was a tense moment, but it was also so real. I was overwhelmed by what it meant that this Native audience member had the opportunity to safely yell at their Lt Governor, a White Earth Ojibwe woman, at the Guthrie Theater because of the conditions we’d fostered over years of relationships.