“I really think art breathes, it can tell us what it means to be Native. Art shows us how to go on, and embrace the other world.”
-William S. Yellow Robe Jr.
A William S. Yellow Robe story is a story with soul. His 70+ plays, poems, and monologues are steeped in his passionate and playful spirit. A pioneer of Native American drama, William S. Yellow Robe (known affectionately as Bill) crafted stories in worlds unmistakably his own – unflinchingly honest, hilarious, and often other-worldly. Yet, the magic of Bill’s worlds isn’t ethereal or illusionary. It is real. Bill’s work takes classical and contemporary theatrical aesthetics and modulates them by telling stories about what matters to his community – a community long ignored by the American Theatre. By allowing the conventions of traditional theatre to influence but not dictate his work, Bill created his version of realism – one where the supernatural is not unearthly, but as innate as the soil his worlds sit on.
CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY THEATRICAL AESTHETICS
Bill drew from the theatrical canon to shape the world of his plays and his characters’ relationships with a world beyond. Spirits or ghosts have a long-standing presence on the stage. In Greek drama, Eidola—or “apparitions of the dead”—were spirit-images of deceased individuals made visible to those among the living. Plenty of examples can be found throughout the tragedies of Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides. These spirits served as authoritative moral guides, sources for resolution and wisdom. Some of the most well-known ghosts of the theatre come from Shakespeare who used them as omens. Banquo in Macbeth haunted the hero to lunacy, as if summoned by a demonic treaty or a witch’s spell. A more contemporary example would be August Wilson. In The Piano Lesson, Sutter’s Ghost is a central presence despite never being seen or heard. The conflict revolves around this vengeful spirit, representative of generations of harm and unresolved trauma for the rest of the characters on stage. For the family to move on they must confront this spirit they can neither see nor tangibly feel. We can see from these examples that ghosts as a dramatic device can guide, warn, taunt, or disrupt those they haunt – but whatever their intentions are they almost always representative of something larger.
To read more about the history of ghosts as a dramatic device, check out our previous Upstage article for THE REFUGE PLAYSNATIVE LIFE AND PERFORMANCE TRADITIONS
Bill’s first plays were written as an adolescent and demonstrated his remarkable talent. In an interview with The Soul of The American Actor, he explains his journey finding his artistic voice started in childhood. Reflecting on his youth in tribal schools he says, “everything that was being taught had nothing to offer me about my culture.” His first encounters with performance art came through drumming at pow wows, with which his family was involved. Facing intense academic alienation, Bill found solace in the ceremonial magic and fantasy realm of performance. His experiences growing up on a reservation would fuel his work throughout his career.
Bill was of Assiniboine and African American ancestry. Facing discrimination for being mixed-blood, intersectionality was a cause that Bill innately embraced. Bill was committed to intertribal and cross-cultural unity. Many of his works explore blood quantum politics, a controversial subject involving calculating and measuring a person’s heritage in order to qualify for tribal membership. Bill unabashedly addresses hot button issues like this, stressing that the Native community is not a monolith and divides exist within it. Yet his work is never without humor. In his play Thieves, Bill comically introduces a “pretendian,” a term used for someone who pretends to be of Native descent. When asked by ICT News if this play was a comedy or drama Bill said, “Well, it’s about Native life, so it’s a little bit of both.” Using comedy to address cultural appropriation highlights how ridiculous it is while exposing its prevalence and harm.
The undercurrents of Bill’s plays veer away from the idealized noble savage trope, and steer toward highlighting the toughness and resilience of a community in the wake of colonial violence and systemic oppression. In Hanay Geiogamah’s essay "Courage, Truth, and Commitment: The Theater of William Yellow Robe, Jr.” he describes Bill’s plots as “based on highly sensitive aspects of contemporary Indian life that are likely to be ignored or denied by tribal traditionalists and academic purists.” The topics Bill explored, including domestic violence and alcoholism, didn’t paint all of his characters in the best light. Some thought it to be in poor taste to depict the underbelly of Native communities with such brutal honesty. But Bill was committed to revealing the innate truth of humanity: no one is perfect. By telling Native stories differently than traditional modes, Bill’s transparency was an inherently political act.
YELLOW ROBE’S MYSTICAL REALISM IN RESTLESS SPIRITS
The romanticization and coopting of Native American spirituality is extremely prevalent; Popular media like Dances with Wolves romanticizes Native life, “plastic shamans” co-opt spiritual practices – usually for financial gain. While this means that dipping into the spiritual world might perpetuate misunderstandings of Native culture, Bill never avoided dramatizing the other worldly, in part because it would almost be unnatural for his plays not to contain the supernatural. His aesthetic of realism includes the spiritual world organically, without justification, because in Native American culture, spirit is reality. On a panel for The Refocus Project, Madeline Sayet, theatre director and one of Bill’s mentees, recalled an experience she had in rehearsal for one of his plays. She asked him if one of the characters, Auntie Harriet, was alive or dead – a fact that was not discernible in the text. He replied, "What's the difference? She's going to show up either way." That straight-forward acceptance and empathic understanding of the spirit world is on full display in the eight plays featured in Restless Spirits. Each play illustrates the variety of ways the spirit world creeps into our own. Alongside human characters there are vengeful ghosts and spirits, Death, and The Trickster. There are haunted people and haunted houses.
Wood Bones depicts the spirit of a home, 121. Generally, in mainstream media, a “haunted home” is scary; In Wood Bones, 121 is the one who is scared. She is not a human spirit, but the spirit of a traumatized place where horrific acts of abuse took place. Violence is both physical and spiritual. Her trauma takes hold on the current residents of the home, like roots into land. Her dramatic conflict is a driving force of the story. Intrinsically, she’s as human as everyone else onstage.
Falling Distance is a story of two lovers separated by different planes of existence, who eventually connect through a portal in magic mirror. In To Cross, the main character travels across the border of the spirit world into the living world. In Frog’s Dance, Frog is a deracinated mixed-blood character who interacts with the spirits of his deceased sister and wife. Wink-Dah takes place in the wake of a brutal hate crime, after which Death and The Trickster play a fateful chess game with fatal stakes. It Came from Across the Big Pond is an homage to sci-fi classics with a uniquely Native twist: the reservation is invaded by assimilation agents who convert people into white folks. In The Curse of the Tiger Lily, Two-Step, a supernatural being from Peter Pan’s Neverland punishes cultural appropriators. One Step In explores how identity politics manifest in the spirit realm: a character who discriminated against mixed-blood people is declined entry at the gates of heaven.
BILL’S LEGACY
Bill saw his work as that of a conduit. He had a ceremonial and communal responsibility to tell these stories. He was a devotee to the invisible world, and a guide for the spirit realm. As an artist, Bill spoke for those without voices: the disenfranchised and the deceased. In an interview for the NEA Blog, he describes developing a “visceral approach” to playwriting.
[Y]ou start trusting your instincts… and you start listening to the spirits around you, those forces that are influential out there. They will help you… your answer is always there for you, but you have to be able to listen to them.
So many of Bill’s tales occur at the precipice of worlds, on the cusp of change, the membrane of metamorphosis. By tracking this change, Bill is carving out a space for communal healing. By exposing wounds, he healed them. Bill spoke of community all the time, and part of the community of which he spoke included our departed ancestors. How fitting that his voice is now with us again, through The Refocus Project. In a panel for The Refocus Project, Donna Couteau – one of Bill’s collaborators – reflected: "I had not heard the sound of Bill's voice in my head and in my heart for a while. And tonight, I heard it, and it felt good. It felt great."
Bill is still here. May his spirit live on.