LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN Chapter 19 - Anna Mae & Leonard: "In video-theatre 'FREE PELTIER'" The funniest thing I ever saw was a little old lady laughing so hard at my play that she fell off her folding chair and was actually rolling around on the floor choking. The situation was nearly tragic, about like the play, as her sons or granddaughters frantically pounded her on the back to get her breathing again, while we on stage had to stop our own crazy antics for a minute to watch the performance in the audience. Reality blurred until I never did know when we were doing the play and when I was living it out on the streets, or in the Oyate Community Center in the Lakota Homes ghetto where we had set up our improvised excuse for theatre. Just when they had gotten the old Lakota Gramma back to some form of normalcy and back in her chair, Jay Hart, a handsome Mohawk woman who was playing Custer in a grotesque mask with long blonde hair, stepped across the borders between art and gender and snuck around behind the Gramma and whispered, "Are you dead yet, Ciye?" Upon which the poor old lady really lost it and screamed and fell off her chair again! Chaos erupted, as all of us poured off the commedia dell'arte platform and chased the evil whiteman around the room and out into the street. Kids and dogs chased after us and we just kept going with it, running around the parking lot as the audience ran after us, and passing cars stopped to gape in wonder at the surreal scene of clowns and devils in fantastic costumes screaming, falling down, throwing confetti-bullets like Jerry Lewis or Harpo Marx wrecking the fabric of society. We just kept it up night after night, year after year, until the play I'd ironically titled 'Free Peltier' became almost an annual event, almost like 'A Christmas Carol' over at the Whitey Community Theatre in town which would never, never allow us to put on our irreverent allegory of tragedy and comedy. We'd asked them and the picturesque Black Hills Playhouse up in Custer State Park, not far from the bad sculpture of something that was being called 'Crazy Horse Mountain' for millions of tourists, to let us put on 'Free Peltier', even as a midnight show, but there was no room in their perennials between Neil Simon and The Sound of Music. In 1990 we'd even asked their board of directors, affiliated with the University of South Dakota, to put on Kopit's 'Indians' in respect to the 100th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre, but, like Senator Tom Daschle who refused to apologize for the massacre, there was just no place for Indians in a State that had an Indian population of 10% and of whom travelers from all over the world came to see not only Mount Rushmore but some remnant of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The local Journey Museum had agreed rather enthusiastically to sponsor us for a performance or two in 1997, but at the last minute they withdrew their invitation as well. Crying, the newly-arrived white lady from New York who was the museum's director of education and who had eagerly signed the contract with me, explained their board of directors had nixed the controversial project. "It's Janklow," ol' Marv Kammerer explained while we tried to console the poor lady out in the hallway, where she was so afraid she had to hide and whisper. "His rich buddies like Stan Adelstein are on the board of directors." "Janklow?" "Yeah. He runs the State, you can be damn sure. You got a scene in there about him raping that girl, Jancita Eagle Deer." "Yeah. But he can't sue anymore, after losing the case to Matthiessen and Newsweek." "That doesn't matter." To this day the play hasn't been seen outside of the reservations and a few community centers in the border towns, and on video which our great Irish cameraman and impresario Bill McIntyre shot, but which has never aired anywhere even on cable access channels. Bill's always trying to sell Buddy Red Bow's music videos to MTV, or the feature video to downloadable computer companies, but no luck. We've tried innumerable times to create some jobs for Skins in TV and all the performing arts, forming corporations and limited partnerships, submitting proposals to tribal councils and foundations, arguing that there is a huge worldwide audience for Native programming in education and entertainment as 'Dances With Wolves' and thousands of popular cowboy- and-indians movies and sitcoms have proved over the centuries, but no luck. Generations of George McGoverns and Bill Janklows come and go, but unemployment remains steady between 60-80%, which keeps the prison population steady at 40%, fetal alcohol syndrome increasing, rapes increasing, real estate prices increasing. I'd argued to sympathetic producers like David Wolper at Warner Bros (who did the atrocious mini- series of Mystic Warrior based on the book 'Hanta Yo') that Indians were highly talented visual and performance artists, and could go into all the clean careers of the technical skills in filmmaking as well, replacing casinos and cattle-ranching as a better economy for the West, but no luck. We'd submitted countless budgets and proposals to generations of Tom Daschles and Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbells to build up Native production studios, but no luck. Instead, Jay Hart put on a grotesque FBI mask and screamed at an actor playing Leonard in a jail cell, "Shut up! No praying in there!" I jumped out in a two-faced Phantom of the Operaesque mask and chortled, "Ha ha, puns, shut up in jail. That's good. That's good. Half the world is starving to death and you guys are making jokes." "Who are you?" Leonard asked. "Oh ho, good question, Ciye, good question. A lot of people have been asking that for a long long, loooong time. Some people call me Unkcegila, The Dump Under The Earth, or the Devil, or Dionysus. Since we're in Lakota territory I'll call myself Iktomi, the dirty spider trickster." "I've heard of you," Leonard sighed saidly. "I'm in no mood for jokes today. It's going on 30 years I'm in the Joint now." In so-called reality, Leonard himself had first approved of the play back in 1994 when we first proposed it to him, and snuck the script into Leavenworth through some friends like Joe Chasing Horse and Rosalie Little Thunder for him to read. He was only allowed to read it while they were there, with guards hovering over his shoulder wondering what was so funny, and then return it after the 2 hour visit. Since theatre efforts are always short on men and long on women, Alice Johnson first read all the whitemen in the play who were all named George, and it was an hilarious conceit from the first. Kathy Burnette read the part of Myrtle Poor Bear, which was pretty ironic and appreciated by all of us, as Kathy had played Anna Mae Aquash in the Ted Turner TV movie 'Lakota Woman', with Mrs. Turner aka Jane Fonda often on the set as the producer and inflaming the Vietnam Vets around town who truly hated her as 'Hanoi Jane', and it was Myrtle who had been directly involved in important aspects of Anna Mae's murder back in 1976. In fact, as the years progressed and FBI investigations into the unsolved case grew, the play grew into more of a paean to Native women than men, and Anna Mae grew into mythic proportions as the personification of all of them. Powerful, beautiful, and tragic, she became almost Everywoman who'd gone unnamed since Columbus in countless massacres, childbirths, heroic struggles for their lands and families in all the Americas from the Arctic to the Antarctic, but also especially important to women as a fallible woman. One lady on an internet chat room snapped, "What's so important about this chick? She drank and slept around." Kathy was embarrassed and a little annoyed, at first, to be playing Mrytle, who was just about the antithesis of Anna Mae. Myrtle was always sneered at by many men (and women, if the truth be known) in the Movement as an ugly, alcoholic, slightly retarded, fat, semi-illiterate fool who had been threatened, and even tortured, by the FBI agents David Price and William Wood until she signed phony affidavits that were used to extradite the fugitive Leonard Peltier from Canada. She later admitted in his trial in Fargo in 1977 that she didn't even know the dynamic Peltier, let alone had never been his girlfriend as she'd said in the 3 affidavits or heard him brag about killing the two FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams. Her tearful, clumsy testimony on the witness stand, and in my play, was one of the most heartbreaking episodes in all our struggles, as she told of the FBIs threatening to do to her young daughter what they'd done to Anna Mae, showing her gruesome autopsy pictures, she said they'd said, of the dead woman mutilated and decomposed, if she, Mrytle, did not sign the affidavits and lie to the world, and make her own name anathema to all Indians everywhere who loved Leonard. Anna Mae's story became epochal as much because of the sickening manner in which she was treated in death - her hands cut off for identification at the FBI crime lab in D.C., they claimed, and exhumed from a Jane Doe grave for a second or even a third gruesome autopsy - as with the constant harrassment and arrests she'd suffered in life.