In Conversation with Muriel Miguel

Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel, the three sisters of Spiderwoman Theater

Legacy and the Persistence of Memory:
A Conversation with Muriel Miguel

Tom Pearson
January 26, 2009

I met Muriel Miguel many years ago when I participated in a workshop that Spiderwoman Theater held at the Kitchen, and my own work as a choreographer and theater artist has been imprinted upon ever since. I caught up with Muriel during the Native Theater Festival and again a few weeks after when she and her sister Gloria Miguel staged a reading of Gloria’s new play, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, at the American Indian Community House here in New York. Before the reading, Muriel gave a lecture demonstration on story weaving, the technique Spiderwoman Theater uses to create its complex, multi-layered performances. The demonstration featured contributions from performers Joe Cross, Donna Cross Couteau, Josephine Tarrant, and Brian Toledo. After the reading, Muriel and Gloria spoke about legacy and the need for the young to listen to the elders, but also for the elders to listen to the young—for all of us to tell our stories and to hear the stories of others.

Muriel and I met again a week later at The Public Theater and had a lengthy conversation about the last seventy years as Muriel rendered a compelling oral history of American Indian performing artists in New York City. We began with a discussion about her friendship with Louis Mofsie, Director of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, a group which Muriel co-founded and with whom we both still perform. From Muriel and Louis’s beginnings in a small community of American Indians in Brooklyn, a whole community of performers emerged.

MURIEL: How far do we go back? We go back as far as our mothers. Alvina Mofsie and Elmira Miguel were best friends. Louis’s mother and father came to New York. They finally settled down in Brooklyn, and the first child was born which was Norton. And I guess, they [the Mofsies] were right next door to my mother and father who had two children, my older sister and my sister Gloria. Norton and my sister Gloria played together. They were playmates, but it was really a whole Indian enclave because there was my mother and father, and I think all my aunts and uncles. They all lived in this one house. And next door, I think it was on Degraw Street but I’m not sure because I wasn’t born, they [the Mofsies] moved in. And, I think with them came two of Louis’s aunts. And then there were a lot of people from Hopi that came and lived there, and from Hochunk, from Nebraska. I guess Josephine was born first. That’s Louis’s sister. Then Louis, then me, and we were all born next door to each other and so we always knew each other. And these two women were really best friends.

TOM: And were you a part of the Little Eagles originally?

Tom Pearson with Muriel Miguel at Spider Woman' Theaters 40th Anniversary celebration at La Mama E.T.C.; Photo by Eva Yaa Asantewaa.

MURIEL: Yes.

TOM: Which became the Thunderbirds later?

MURIEL: Right.

TOM: And you have a background as a choreographer.

MURIEL: I have a background really as a dancer. That’s how I started. What happened was that, I mean, that was a great rebellion at that time because there were all of these young kids that were dancing and singing, and I don’t know if I’ve said this to you. I forget who I’ve talked to after a while. I’m old you know [laughing heartily]. It was a time when there was real oppression. We’re talking about the religious acts, and all of these dances and songs were forbidden. It was really verboten, so when the Hopis came to town, they came and they found these little kids that wanted to sing and dance, right? Same way with a lot of the Sioux people. These people could not pass their songs and dances and religious aspects onto their own, and this is my own feeling, my own private feeling about this, so they passed it onto whatever young mind, fertile mind, that was there and wanted to. And here they were in New York City, and no one was stopping them.

TOM: Do you think that was because of the urban situation...

MURIEL: Yeah.

TOM: ...that allowed a space for that to happen?

MURIEL: Yes. Certainly. Certainly. So, they just gave it to us like that, you know. You ask Louis Mofsie about people like Johnny Sunroad. And God, there was so many of them. I remember him. He was Hopi, and you know, we learned all these dances, and if you ask Louis, there’s a photograph of the first powwow ever to happen on the East Coast, and it happened in Connecticut, and it happened in a big arena, and we had everything. We had horses. People just came and taught us and taught us and taught us, you know, and they would take us by bus to various places to learn to dance, and we even had a tap dancer [laughing]. We had a tap dancer and what do you call it now? You know, an Apache couple, duet. They did Swan Lake and so forth, but they also did one of those Apache dances, and they were Mohawk [laughter].

So, we have a photo that has all of us in it, and we’re the youngest. We’re way down at the bottom. You see this picture of us. We’re the youngest, right, and our fathers and uncles and mothers, everybody, my sister, everybody’s in this. You know, I sometimes… I do a one-woman retrospective, and that’s one of the things. I blew this picture up, and Louis has this picture also. I blew it up, and I show it on a big screen. And, I say to Native people, I say, “Come up here, and I bet you’ll find someone you’re related to” because everybody was in town for this. I mean, it was the biggest thing, and you know, it was in an arena. My sister sang the “Star Spangled Banner.” We had guys from the 101 Club with us. You know what that is? It’s the old wild west shows, and after the wild west show, Wild Bill Cody, when they broke up, all these guys left. But they were already in show biz, these guys, and they did all this stuff, you know. The Grand Entry came from there.

So, that’s what happened when we were kids, and from there, we really started to dance. And then there was a huge reaction in the public schools because the public schools said there were no more Indians, and Indian culture is dead. And how could that be?

TOM: When there you were there.

MURIEL: [laughing] We were so immersed, and I remember really, even at that age, questioning the Social Studies teacher to the point where he tried to make me feel bad. I didn’t make the connection. I mean, I was really militant, and also felt that we had to, we really had to do something about it, and so that’s how we started the Little Eagles. And it wasn’t only Josephine, Louis, and myself. There were all these Mohawks that were involved because they lived all around us, and there was a church that had a Mohawk service and a minister there who really believed. He taught Mohawk, and he really believed that that was a way to bring… but he was interesting because he was a socialist, and so, he went amongst a lot of people, and when we came and we asked him if we could use his downstairs basement to teach and to work out dances and so forth, he said, “yes.” And so we had this big party and invited people. We were very young, I mean we were like ten, eleven, twelve, and we were doing this. And we invited all the fathers and mothers of the kids that we wanted to work with, and everyone was so excited. And we started, and we always had that place to go to. We did it for a very long time as Little Eagles until we got a little too old to be called the Little Eagles [laughter]. And I guess it was Louie Martin that said, “What about the Thunderbirds?” I think he was the one, and we were all very close because our mothers, because our families were close. So, it meant that we, a lot of people kept an eye on us. And when very handsome Native guys came into town, and one happened to impregnate one of the young women, it was, like, it was dreadful. I was so angry. Our parents snatched us up. Home we went, not to stick our head out again. That man was around, you know, like floating sperm… [laughing].

TOM: Sort of an overreaction?

MURIEL: It was very funny, but the telephone was just like, everyone who was anyone had a telephone, and my parents, my mothers, all the mothers kept in touch with each other. You know, there are people out there now, if you hear the name, there’s a guy, he’s a ventriloquist, Buddy Big Mountain, and his mother was one of the Thunderbirds, you know, and so was his uncle, and it’s so funny to see this whole family of Big Mountains and say, “Oh, my God.” How did they meet? And that I made the wedding cake for Marguerite and Arthur, you know? These old, old times, and old people.

TOM: And all coming from one spot, that one particular place?

MURIEL: Yeah.

TOM: It feels like we just jumped into a conversation about legacy, which is cool because that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about with you initially, and you know, it’s funny to hear you say how people would come and teach the dances to anybody because you were willing to learn and that was able to happen because you were in this sort of urban setting. You know, looking at the Thunderbirds now, forty-five years later, they still feel that way, like a repository for cultural preservation, of the certain things that they were given. At the same time, I feel, it’s been an interesting trajectory for you and what you’ve done, and I feel like you’ve always been highly political whether you meant to be or not. You know, just by saying you are here and that this is what you are interested in. That made Spiderwoman kind of jump into the consciousness in a way that was really powerful, and your politics, then... Well, I know that the academic communities are very interested in you [laughter] and you mentioned that...

MURIEL: Mama Mia!

TOM: ...getting into this headspace thing, but I guess the question about that is, a lot has been written about you and Spiderwoman and politics of race, and identity, and gender, and sexuality, and sort of, auto exoticism and all of that. Did you intend to have that happen, or did it organically evolve? And is it different now? I mean, are your political interventions now still dealing with the same kind of issues [long pause]. That was kind of a lot to ask all at once [big laughter].

MURIEL: [laughing] Well, let me go back to where we were, and talk to you about us growing up here and the legacy that I feel that was left. I think, and I understand a lot of times, what happens with young people because I see young people come here from across the country and from Canada and so on. And, because everything is so anonymous, I understand how easy it is to not be part of a community, you know? You don’t have to be, because there is a certain type anonymity that happens here. And it’s good. I mean, I’ve heard young people say, “It’s so great. I walk down the street and nobody says, ‘Oh there’s an Indian.”

TOM: That idea of passing.

MURIEL: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s not even passing. It’s that you’re not being pointed to. If you do it in an Oklahoma town, like Joe Cross says, they all know who you are. You know, you do it, even in Toronto; they all know who you are. And so, here it’s such a big pie, and people enjoy that. They enjoy it until they get lonely.

TOM: Until they feel like they’ve lost some of that, and then it becomes about reclamation.

MURIEL: Yeah. Right. And that’s when they start seeking, you know, and going back. And all of a sudden, someone will show up. Like there’s this guy. He’s from Alaska. Sherman. He just showed up. He’s been here quite a while [laughing], and he just showed up, and with that kind of thing like, “Hi. How are you?” And he thought he knew me, which I thought was funny. It was my sister he knew. But that’s, I think, the nature of the beast, you know, in how we look at things, and so, you know, I go back to that same thing again. People were so happy to pass onto us, this repository that we were, you know, just like sponges here. But we all went to school, right? A lot of us went to school, and Louis, who was the main singer, went upstate. And I went to dance school, and Josephine got married. And of course, amongst all that, it sounds so easy. But it wasn’t easy because all those things that happened on the rez were happening here: the drinking, the drugs, the drinking and driving and drugs, you know what I mean? So, a lot of us died before we were forty in that small group that we had. That’s just a small group of maybe twenty kids. And, we were always involved as show biz Indians. There’s no way of getting away from that. I, myself, don’t feel proud of it. I mean my father started out on the corner selling snake oil.

TOM: Which you talk about in your shows.

MURIEL: Right. Here in New York City. So, we have done a lot of that “Show biz.” You know, Red Wing, Louis’s aunt was part of Tom Mix and the silent movies. And we’ve done all of that sideshow stuff. I personally couldn’t [laughing] handle it after a while, and then felt guilty because I felt like I was a sell out, and I also felt that I... it’s hard for me to do the Thanksgiving things in November. It’s really hard for me to do it. I did it for a while, but my other stuff came in.

TOM: You mean how everybody wants an Indian performance in November?

MURIEL: Yeah. And I hate it. I really hate it. Sometimes, you know, all those things to me are selling out. And if I had my druthers I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do that kind of work.

TOM: And then, that work has provided so much fodder for all your creative expressions where you sort of reclaim and reformat it.

MURIEL: ...because they were all show biz Indians. The thing that saved some of us, I mean my family, with a lot of heartache and a lot of fighting, was that my uncle was two things. My uncle was a medicine man, and would go back to Kuna Yala, you know, and really would come back and worry about the kids and worry about his grand nieces, you know, what was happening to them. I remember saying that my daughter was, I rattled off four or five tribes, and my uncle looking at my daughter, hurt me so much beause he said, “Poor thing.” And I was like, “Oh my God.” He really feels like that. Poor thing! Because she’s not a full blood. In his mind, she’s not a full blood. You know what I mean? She’s a full blood, [laughing] but she’s not a full blood.

TOM: Right. And I think a lot of people don’t realize the nuances with that, that certain tribes, you know, you marry another tribe, from a Western point of view, you are still full-blooded, but from within your own tribal system, you are not full anything.

MURIEL: Right. But now it’s becoming more and more because the world is getting smaller and smaller. I know what I was trying to tie this back to. I understand when young people come here and they want to be like everyone else. They don’t want to make waves. You keep your head under the table. I understand that because in dance school that’s how I was, but I was so protected in a way from a lot of stuff. I just went ahead and did things. I think Louis did too. We didn’t realize that we were out of synch [laughing]. So, things happened like, I auditioned for Julliard, and I didn’t get in, and one of the reasons I didn’t get in, I didn’t know you were supposed to bring ballet slippers. And also, you have to show a sample of your work, and my work was out there, already. I had a chair, and reggae music. And I did a dance with sitar music. And everyone was doing Swan Lake [laughing], and they all came with their mothers, and here I was, this little scraggly thing that came in. And I upset them so much. One of the dance teachers was so upset because I didn’t have ballet slippers. They felt so bad for me; bad and embarrassed. And I said, “Nevermind.” So, of course, I didn’t get in, but I did get a scholarship to Alwin Nicholai at the Henry Street Playhouse. But I was already working as a dancer in my own community. I already had the stage presence because we, all of us, were working as dancers, as Native dancers, but I would never say that. I wanted to learn another thing. So, you know, I went to Erick Hawkins, and I didn’t say anything, but he spotted me because he lived in Taos and all that kind of stuff, so he knew. And you know, he did a kachina dance, and I thought I was going to die. I thought, “Oh my God, he’s doing a kachina dance.” And they were all counting. You could hear them counting from the seats [laughing].

TOM: That had to be very strange for you.

MURIEL: Well, I kept it all under cover, and I understand when they keep things under cover. I kept it really under cover. I watched them. I maybe imitated them, but I kept it really under cover because I was more interested in absorbing what they had than giving out what I had.

TOM: It’s interesting, that Hawkins example. I’m thinking of your work where you are there, Native, playing white people, playing Native [laughing].

MURIEL: Well, I kept very quiet, and the last person I studied with was Jean Erdman, also out of [Martha] Graham. But Jean had another background. She also came from Hawaii, and her background was really Hula. And again, another woman, I mean she’s from a pineapple family, and she was married to what’s his name?

TOM: Joseph Campbell.

MURIEL: Joseph Campbell. So, Joe Campbell was with us all the time. Now it’s so funny, you know, like, with Joe Campbell, he would give workshops, you know, and I had no idea who this man was. He would talk about myth and mythology, and he was a boyscout, you know, and he was so happy to have me in his class. And I was like, no connections at all. It was so funny. He was this really handsome man, really great big Irish man, turned up nose, deep blue eyes, and was so happy to have me, and would stand there and stare at me. You know I’d look at this man, and I finally said to Jean, “Hey, you really got a good looking husband” [laughter]. “Where’d you get him?” She told me the story too, was so interesting. She was a student, and he was a professor at Bard, and she seduced him.

TOM: She was teaching Graham?

MURIEL: No, she was a student. It was a big scandal. She ran away with the professor [laughter]. And at one point, I was also teaching at Bard. It was so funny. Now Bard is this big fancy college, and it used to be this really interesting college. What did I want to say about that? So, I can understand how you want to keep undercover and absorb and not give anything away, so that people don’t, so that the spotlight is not on you. And all through those younger years, I was like that. The only people that really, that really would take me and say, “I want you to do this, this, and this Muriel” was Ellen Stewart. She’d say, “Come here, girl.” She knew because my parents would come to see all the shows, and she was like beyond herself that all these little Indians were coming in to see these shows. She was like, you know, she was so happy, and she would describe them. I met her a couple of years ago, and she would talk about what my parents would look like when they came in. So, she knew. But certainly Alwin Nicholai didn’t. Murray Louis didn’t. They just thought I was a strange.

TOM: And Joseph Chaikin?

MURIEL: Joe knew. We were all in Nevada, and there was a point there, I guess I had a poncho in a casino there. And we were all sitting there, and everybody sort of ordered a drink. And I look up, and I order a drink, and there’s beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, and then she put it down. And I remember someone said, “Gee, Muriel, I thought she wasn’t going to take your order.” And I said, “Yeah. I thought so too.” But no one made the connection. They were completely out of it. They had no idea what this was about, and so me showing my brown face, I knew what it was about in a way. I didn’t really comprehend it, but I knew what this was about more than they did. They were just privileged people, and so when I went into Circus Circus and saw all these monkeys dressed up as Indians being twirled around on machines and everything, and everyone laughing. All this stuff happens above you as you gamble, and I thought to myself, “Jesus Christ.” And then someone saying to me, “Well, you know, it’s my culture too; I’m an American too, so it’s my culture too.”

TOM: It’s their invention. And it still happens in places, which is strange, maybe not in that exact way, but you still see it.

MURIEL: Yeah, so you know, I grew up with all that, and what you have to think of is that you have to own up to it. You really do. You have to own up to it. You have to say, “Well, Muriel, you sold out there. Well, Muriel you didn’t say anything there. Well, Muriel, you could’ve been a little more forthright there. Well, Muriel, you shouldn’t have just smiled and walked away.” All those things, and say it to yourself. You know, otherwise, I can’t live with myself. I can’t live with myself thinking that I did not say something. I did not put my all in there because it was so hard all that time, you know. Yeah, Joe. But the others didn’t really realize what I was. I think they realized when, maybe, when I got married, and Josephine gave me a huge powwow at the McBurney Y [YMCA], and everybody was at the drum and everything. And you know, all those people, Gerry Ragni, Steve Forrest, Fred Forrest, all those names now, they came. And they were all so excited, but they never made the connection [laughing]. [Pause] From Open Theater, I had that whole dance training behind me, and that’s how I came into Open Theater, as a dancer. I came in, and there was other woman, Lynn Laredo, Jean Erdman. I understudied Jean. I taught for Jean, that kind of stuff. Betty Meredith Jones was one of them. They were all Laban people. And that’s what Lynn brought in to Jean, so we had a laboratory of Laban. I was working in Laban since I was thirteen because I met this woman Lynn Laredo, and I started to work in Laban. So, initially, my first input into modern dance was through Laban. It’s so ingrained in me. I have to really break it down to teach it because I naturally do it. It’s like Native dancing. And you’ll see it in the stuff I do, that it has a lot of Laban, or it’s connected in some way.

TOM: How did you develop your own working method, story weaving?

MURIEL: What happened was that when I came out of Open Theater, I was working as an actress, and you know, agents call you up. And, you find, at that point, that you can’t do anything except whores, maids, only mothers of color. It’s all commercial stuff, and all the worst things you could probably do to women. Those were the only roles you could probably get. So, I was discouraged in that way. I think I developed a part for myself in an Arrabal play. Arrabal came here, and I worked with him, and so we had a great time. He was a crazy guy that was interested in me. The same reason, because I was Native. He had no idea what that meant. And so, because of the way I respond to stuff, he got all excited. So, he actually wrote a part for me in his play. That’s the kind of stuff I was doing, and I still wasn’t satisfied.

Then, one of the things that happened, was that Joe started to talk about storytelling, and it was funny to me because, when we started talking about storytelling, I thought, “I know that. I understand that.” And they talked about it in terms of something new. OK. It’s new [laughing]. And I didn’t think about it much, but they were taking apart storytelling, and I knew storytelling, you know. I knew it from the bottom of my toenails, my heels, bottoms of my feet. I talk about this a lot, about storytelling coming from listening under the kitchen table, you know. So, when he talked about it, I understood him clearly. I understood the paths, and how one can go into another path, and the sounds of it. Joe would say, “I’m not talking about Mickey Mouse, ‘tick tick tick’ or I’m walking down the stairs, ‘boom boom boom.’ I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the feeling. Like what is red, and what is the smell, and how do you express the smell?” I understood that. So, I understood enough when I left Open Theater, because all of our stuff, The Serpent, was based on that really. It was all the stories of the bible. Terminal was based on that, all the stories of death. Viet Rock, in a way, was based on that. It was stories of war. And the Ubu plays were, again, in a way, because it was taking the very essence of a lot of the stuff in the Ubu plays, because the Ubu was so out there. Do you know them, the Jarry plays?

TOM: Ubu Roi?

MURIEL: Yeah. So, I played Mère Ubu, and it was like taking the essence of something, like the essence of being stupid, well, not stupid, but the essence of craving, of wanting, and never satisfied, and trying to find that nasty kind of... but taking essences, you know to put upon a character that... who knows what the hell they were talking about? All of that, I think I brought with me when I left Open Theater, and so when I started to think about storytelling, I started really thinking about it in a different way. And, I started to work with a group of women. It was the beginning of the women’s movement, and I really wasn’t interested in the women’s movement. You know, like, go away don’t bother me. And then Lynn Laredo, she was burning bras and all that in Atlantic City. What’s that about? So, she started a group and they did a lot of, not storytelling, but a lot of it in dance movement. And so I joined this group, and again, I found that thing, the propaganda that comes with what a Native person is, but I found that my propaganda was just as strong... So, spent time with this group really exploring that, and exploring and using stories to tell it. And, in exploring who I was and all the stories that I was ashamed to tell about my family, I started to tell... and really upset my family. But, I’m proud of those stories, and that was just the beginning of trying to understand what stories meant and how I heard those stories from my family, really heard those stories from my family. And how some of those stories were secret stories, and then I went to Sun Dance. I’m a Sun Dancer, and I realized again, “Damn, I’m really Indian.” You know, that thing? I say it in one of my pieces, how I’m really Indian. Men are piercing, you know, and you are dancing, and all your attention is on the piercing, and someone is piercing from the back. Someone is dragging a Buffalo skull. You know, you are really committed to who you are, and there’s no getting away from it. You know, you’re really Indian. And, it’s understanding it, like you understand stories. It comes from way, way deep down, from the center of the earth, before time, you know, this feeling, right? And I came back, and I had one experience where I was sitting after the Sun Dance. I was sitting on a bank, and a butterfly came and sat on my hand, and I just... It didn’t fly away, and it started to talk to me. And I was talking to the butterfly, and it was such a sacred moment for me, and such a you know, that kind of connection. That kind of connection, not from English speaking people, not from anything that is Euro-connected, but from another place... uh, I’m gonna cry... but from a place that’s from beyond beyond. So, so deep. And that was the first time, I really understood it. Before that, I was this little girl, wandering and picking up things, looking at them and shaking them and saying, “Oh, that works.” I was in my thirties then I guess. That was my first Sun Dance. And, you know, I became a woman at that point. I say it now. I didn’t say it then, you know. So, I had in me thoughts about now what I wanted to do with theater, and I never thought of it as theater. It was, “This is what I want to say.” I wasn’t talking about theater. I was talking about, “this is what I want to say,” so my first impulse was with these two women, and I didn’t get along really with them, with one of them. And it was baby things. We were two similar really, both wanted to be leaders and both had different ideas and stuff. So, I started to look around for other people that I wanted to work with, and I had big groups of women that I would just invite, and we would sneak into, what’s the name of that NYU’s...

Spiderwoman Theater

TOM: Tisch?

MURIEL: I told you about that right?

TOM: Yes.

MURIEL: Anyway, I was asked to perform something at Washington Square Methodist Church. It used to be a hot bed of Socialism and all kinds of radical things. Spiderwoman did their first performances there. They had a very radical minister. And a lot of avant garde... It was down the street. There was the other church...

TOM: Judson.

MURIEL: Judson. And down from Judson was the Washington Square Methodist Church, and they both had radical ministers. So, Judson had Al Carmine, and uh, I can’t remember his name. He married me, matter of fact [laughing]. So, there was a very avant garde group of musicians, and I had worked with them before because of some other people. So, I can’t even remember. I’m getting old [laughing]. Anyway, they did things with bowls and dropping rocks and playing with feathers, all sounds. But they were all real musicians, and this is what they were all doing. So, they were playing with the Tibetan bowls, and dropping rocks [laughing]. And they asked me if I was interested in adding to this, so I had this image of Josephine, cause Josephine one time started to tell the Spiderwoman stories, creation stories. So what I did was I put her on, like, three boxes. And Washington Square Methodist Church is huge. And, Josephine was a wonderful, wonderful seamstress and craftsman. She did wonderful beadwork, and she did other things, like finger weaving. And so, what I did was drop her from the balcony. I dropped a belt that was half finished, that she was working on. So, she was on top of there and she finger weaved, and she told the creation stories.

My other friend, I don’t know if you know. Do you know Split Britches?

TOM: Yeah. Peggy Shaw and Lois [Weaver].

MURIEL: Well, Lois. And so Lois was the in the original Spiderwoman, and Peggy Shaw came later. Lois had this dream about making love to Jesus Christ. And it was a real, real dream for Lois, a connection of who she was as an ex-Baptist, a Baptist, a Christian, and what it meant to her. And I did the story of the butterfly, and what I did was project a river that ran between all of us. I was on one side, Lois was on the other side, Josephine was up there, and I started to script it. You know, so I would hear it, hear where the place would be that you would start Lois’s story, and then I would hear where I could come in, and so the weaving at times, we were saying the same words even. We’d use the same gesture at times. But it was really choreographed. And that was the beginning. It was me experimenting with my idea of what I thought story weaving was about and how it’s the core, it’s the kernel of how this is part of this. And this is part of that. And how it’s universal, but it’s not “UNIVERSAL.” And that’s how story weaving was created for me, and then I took that idea, and that’s when I started to work. And this, in a way, was way before Spiderwoman. It was like maybe a year because Josephine passed away within, and that just [trailing off]... With Josephine passing away came my determination to do this before, you know, I wasn’t even forty. Josie just became forty when she passed away, so it was like, if I don’t do this now, I will never do this. And I will never discover what I am talking about. And I say it like this now. At that time, it didn’t feel that way. It felt like, okay that’s it: “Aaaaaahhhh! [screaming]. It’s got to happen!”

TOM: I like thinking that story weaving is choreographing theater, you know, because it feels that way. You did a lecture demonstration before Gloria Miguel’s reading of her new play last week, which was great to see how you draw from different components, and then intersect them, and layer them, and then to get to see it in performance right after; that was satisfying. I thought about it that way, that it looks like a choreographic process, and choreography to me.

MURIEL: But what is choreography, then? You know Stalin on the Beach, and any of those things, Nixon in China, you know what is it?

TOM: Right. Riefenstahl and Nuremberg…

MURIEL: Right. You know, so I didn’t think of myself anymore as a dancer or a choreographer. I really thought of myself as a director. It was much later. Our first piece was called Women in Violence, and it explored…

Lysistrata Numbah, 1977

TOM: The first Spiderwoman piece?

MURIEL: Right. And I had great help from Open Theater. First of all, I thought we were very serious [laughing], and these people were falling off their chairs. They thought we were so funny, and I understood once it hit the audience. What the audience was saying. You can’t work in a box. That was obvious. And our stories, even though they were heartfelt or sorrowful or terrible, a lot of the stuff was funny because of the way I put it together, the way my mind works. And then, someone said to me, “OK. So you got it.” I don’t know who in Open Theater. “But it has to be layered more. “Layer it more, and start putting in stuff. Think of it in terms of repeating.” You know, “dat dat dat dat BAH dat dat dat dat BAH," you know? So, I started to look at it that way. They didn’t say it, but this is how I think of it. You know, like, what is the container for all of this? What holds it together? And so, again, a lot of talk between us, from all of us talking about what is the cement that holds this together. So, we started to talk about dirty jokes and obscene gestures, and out of that came the stuff. We went around and asked my sister’s husband. He’s a hard hat type of guy. He gave us all these awful, awful anti-women jokes, you know? Those guys that whistle at you, and say, “Hey look at those tits” and whatever else they say to you when you’re walking down the block. Those stories. Those jokes. What offends people? We didn’t say pushing the envelope, but really going out there, taking it to the absurd because that’s what we were talking about. It is absurd that someone could do things to you and make you feel bad. This is all in one piece, some guy jerking off in front of you. What do you do about it? So, they all had stories about it. People say, “Oh, you’re so uptight.” This was the 60s [laughing], or “You didn’t see that. That’s your fault to look.” And we made a big story out it: [starts to sing] “Da da da da dum.” We did it in a chorus line. Women loved it. Men would crawl away.

TOM: Well, it’s uncomfortable when you go to that extreme, it’s both so deadly and so funny at the same time because people don’t know how to really deal with it.

MURIEL: So, it was that kind of weaving and heavy layering, one thing on top of the other... and sexual abuse stories the same way, and I talked about AIM [American Indian Movement] the same way. Upset a lot of AIMsters.

TOM: Especially at that time, right?

MURIEL: Oh, my husband was so upset with this. You know the guys, would come and watch. We started at 38th Street. That was the first Community House. And we had a third floor, which we turned into a theater, and we always had a theater. Everyone was so surprised. We turned it into a theater. We put up lights. We almost had tin cans, and we had cement floors. It was freezing up there. Everyone helped us at the community house, and we had a guy that ran the lights because he did it for some rock shows, so he did it for us. We didn’t ask for much, just put lights on, put lights off. And we did it at the Community House. We opened it at the Washington Square Methodist Church, and then we ran it at the Community House. We did it where Amerinda is now. That place. We did this show, Women in Violence for the First Women’s Shelter. This place was amazing. New York City was amazing because it was all this stuff, people didn’t think of it as grass roots, but it was really grass roots. And we were doing it without even thinking that it was grass roots, and we were mainly Native.

TOM: It also sounds like you did it, talking about what you needed to talk about, but the timing of it also coincided with all of these other things happening which gets layered on too, the feminist movement, AIM, and that gets absorbed somehow into your identity.

MURIEL: Well, I was really a feminist. I am a feminist. And I was battling with my own craziness of having a husband and children and all of that at the same time. And, so you know, that was a big thought. All of us, I think, were battling with that. How do you deal with men, at a time when we were so angry? I mean, I was really angry that I couldn’t walk down the street in my sheer cotton thing without somebody, the butcher, staring at my breasts. It really angered me.

TOM: Interesting, the butcher… That’s kind of an accurate metaphor [laughter].

MURIEL: Right. You know, I mean and being married to a real dog, you know, was very hard. And, the fact that I wasn’t brought up that way. I was brought up as an emancipated female because both sides of my family come from matriarchal societies, you know? Getting your period is a big deal. Not whispering about it, but, “PERIOD! BLOOD!” [Laughter] It’s no small thing. You know what I mean? So, to turn around and live in a neighborhood where it’s all, “You got the curse.” And then going into places where, “Stay away from me. You’re going to take my strength because you have your period,” you know? It was like, “huh?” It’s my strength. You know, because I was brought up like that. So, I found myself being thrown up against this wall of anti-women, and you know, all these guys were talking about the worst things you could do to women was an Indian way. C’mon. Give me a break. Go wash the dishes. So, I had all these guys in my one room apartment. They were sleeping on my floor. And I had a new baby, so I was nursing, so I’d go into the other room to nurse, and all these guys would come along and sit at my feet, and talk to me. I didn’t want these guys around me while I was nursing. I’d go into the next room, and they’d follow me into the next room. So, I felt like this Mother Earth that didn’t want to be a Mother Earth, and then I realized that Mother Earth was one of those words that trap you. Because they say “Mother Earth” to you, and you say, “Yes.” And so, you find yourself doing five jobs while the guy is just sitting there. Then he takes the credit. And I got fooled. So, the beginning of Spiderwoman, I started to unfool. I put it like this: You’re going up a hill, and you’re working very hard to get up that hill. You have a long cloak, and on the cloak are your babies, your family, and so forth, and also your husband. And he’s saying: “I’m so proud of you. You’re so wonderful. You can do it. I know you can do it. You’re so full of vitality, and you’re so full of life and determination. You’re Mother Earth.” And you say, “Yes! Yes, I can do it! Yes I’m going to go, and I’m gonna go up that hill, and I’m gonna bring everyone-with-me-and-I’m-gonna...” and you’re pulling, and you believe it. You believe your own myth. “I’m Mother Earth! I can do this!” And I saw it around me. I saw all these women doing this, and I was the bad one ‘cause I was saying, “Get off the fucking cloak [laughing]. Walk up yourself.” And so [they thought] I didn’t believe in family. Obviously, I didn’t believe in family if I did such a thing. I found that to be a feminist was not to be Indian and not to believe in family, and you hate men. And, I had to go back and look at this, and I said, “Get out of here.” [Laughing] They’re jerks, you know? And to go through all of Native people’s reactions to me being a feminist was not easy.

TOM: Do you think that during that time that the Native audiences were your most critical?

MURIEL: Yeah. Except for the people like Rosemary Richmond, you know, that understood what I was talking about. And saying, “Yeah, Muriel, you tell them.” That’s where I was in the feminist movement, and then I started to realize that, “Hey, the feminist movement doesn’t really recognize me.”

TOM: In my conversation with Oskar, we talked about how everyone in the festival said “Spiderwoman” at some point. “Because I saw Spiderwoman do it, I knew I could do it.” Or, “I learned this from Spiderwoman” or, you know, everyone can track, in some way, how they’ve been influenced by what you’ve done. And, I said, “Yeah, but also, a lot of what’s happening in avant-garde theater or performance art, in what we call a downtown aesthetic in New York, can say that as well. I mean, it’s not just Native people. What you guys were doing at that time, and where Split Britches sort of moved on from, and you continued, and what Deb Margolin and other people...

MURIEL: Right. Right.

TOM: ...in that trajectory have been doing is all going right back to that, so the web is a lot wider than people often acknowledge.

Spiderwoman Theater Group, founded in 1975

MURIEL: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I agree. I so enjoy watching Split Britches. I think they are just absolutely wonderful, and I think it’s that thing that sometimes when you feel so depressed, and you go to see something like that and you say, “Yes. That’s why I’m working.” You know, when I used to go see Joe, and I’d say “Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s why I’m working. It’s because of Joe, because of that kind of aesthetic of looking and exploring, and picking up something and seeing the veins, and getting lost in the veins, and maybe people saying, “What the hell is she doing?” Coming out on the other side with information for yourself to go on. Sometimes, you know, you do something that isn’t so great, but the information it holds is what’s important. Yeah. I say this to my students, to think of it as a safe space, and it may fail, but the information that you receive in failing is the lesson. You know, it’s not that it’s triumphant, but what you gather at that time, that’s what excites me now. That’s REALLY what excites me now, finding those places. And now, I’m older. It’s a scary place at times, too, because I’m looking at death, you know, aging, looking at aging. I’m looking at death and what happens after death, and that passage of time between aging and the knowledge in your head, until the time you let go, or of other people going before you. It’s a big difference between Josephine dying, which I think was the most radical thing that could’ve happened to any of us at that time. I mean, it was so radical. You have no idea. I went off screaming. Louis went off screaming. It was great determination at that time because she was oldest of any of us, and she wasn’t making forty. That’s something, you know, and still to be so close and to... I don’t know what I’m saying.

TOM: Well, where you are going is kind of in line with a question with what I wanted to ask you about Spiderwoman’s legacy now and where you want it to go because I know your daughter is performing with you. Your granddaughter performed with Gloria’s show last week.

MURIEL: Again it goes back to all those places. It goes back to the Mofsies and the Miguels. We all performed, and I’m not saying that’s the best way to perform. You throw the kid out on the stage and say, “dance.” You know [laughing], but maybe they will go on to be performers, singers. But as Deborah [Ratelle] said, “It would be nice to have an architect in the family” [laughing]. Or a scientist. Oh well.

TOM: We started with legacy, your own and Spiderwoman’s, and I actually have a more detailed question for you. I saw you, saw Spiderwoman perform in the Bronx at the museum there, and your daughter, Murielle [Borst], was performing with you, and you were trying to figure out how to address the older work by sort of divvying up some of Lisa’s [Lisa Mayo] material, now that she’s retired from performing. And there was also a moment where Murielle brought her own new material to it. And that moment was actually interesting to me because it seems that the work that you all make is so much about, so much about you. It’s all coming from all of you, and coming from your relationships with each other and experiences together and how that changes when other people come into the mix. I know you’ve always worked with people other than your two sisters, Matoaka, the Colorado sisters, and different iterations of your group, but it always seems like it’s so much about those involved, and that’s why I think it always feels universal.

MURIEL: It’s specific, but that’s what makes it universal. I mean this is the fight I have with Gloria all the time. That I feel like if it gets too personal, it becomes, “You’re bad and I’m good,” and so how, again, it’s going into that area of looking to see what did the grandma do? What was the grandma’s story?

TOM: This is the “don’t choke the child” moment from Gloria’s new show?

MURIEL: Yeah. Right [laughing], and you know, there’s another story there. I don’t know it. I only know it from feelings about it, you know. Of this woman who came from Virginia who during the Civil War and so on, went back into the plantation and wouldn’t have anything to do with the Civil War. Who, when she finally came out, found that she didn’t have any land, and she had to make believe that she was a slave to get land. So, there’s great bitterness there. I think there were other things too. At the same time, these were women that were midwives and herbalist, and so all of them worked, went on horseback. My grandmother and great-grandmother went on horseback to deliver babies on the plantation and outside where Indians lived. So, I think there’s a big story there, but we will never know it. I know what I saw as a baby because I was two years old. This was an embittered woman who didn’t want to be up here, who was really a country woman from the south who was now here and being idolized because she was beautiful. And she didn’t want that. She wanted to be back there without shoes on, and because she was so frightened, and she lost children to cholera and so on, and up here in New York it was just as bad as it was in the south only it was hidden. So, there were still petitions made that my family could not live on that block. They tried to keep them off that block because they weren’t white, on the block that I live now. And it was only because of this good man that said, “This is not right and I am going to rent this house to them.” And that story is there. There is a lot there. She had to fight. She didn’t want my mother to marry an Indian because she was a Christian Indian, and my mother found the most savage of them all [laughing]. She found a Kuna. Man! They spoke their own language. They didn’t wear shoes. They had rings in their noses. Holy Mackerel! [Laughing] You know? So, I think of all of that as legacy. I talk about this in Red Mother a lot. Legacy does not mean that it’s wonderful. Legacy does not mean that you impart wonderful, thoughtful things to the next generation. Legacy is legacy. There bad legacy. It’s awful. It’s mean. It’s all of that. That’s legacy, and that goes down the line too. And also, we would not be here. I would not know the things that I know, if I didn’t have a grandmother. She delivered me. She fought for me and my mother when I was born. She threw out the doctor because he was calling us savage. She did all of that, and that’s a legacy, you know? It’s not nice. She was not nice. She was not a nice lady. She did all kinds of things to her kids, but at the same time, I can stand here and say, “I was born on the floor on 333 Degraw Street.” And my grandmother pulled me out, all of that back there that makes us who we are now. We hate them. My sister hates that grandma, and I can’t exactly, maybe it’s because I grew up later, I can’t exactly hate her. I can’t because I know that she was a barefoot woman, and I know that she was a midwife. And those things bring great strength to me. Though, you know, I think that she was so neurotic that she couldn’t work her way out of a paper bag, but that doesn’t mean that we can negate that. That’s what I guess I’m getting at. You can’t negate that. If there’s a schizophrenic in the family, you can’t negate it. There was a schizophrenic in the family, but in that, terrible things happened. There could be sexual abuse in the family.

TOM: They all have stories.

MURIEL: Yes. Yes. Yes. And that’s what I guess I’m talking about. That’s so important to me, that persistence of memory makes us, what we do each night, how we wake up, what you think about when you open your eyes. That’s all part of it, and that to me is legacy. For me, I am responsible for those next generations. When I die, it does not take away responsibility. I still have that, even if I’m dead, and I have to think about that. And maybe they didn’t think about it. Maybe my Uncle Joe did. I think my uncle Joe did. I don’t know if my mother did. She was angry at the end.

TOM: And then, maybe they are helping you think about it now, and maybe they reconcile through you?

MURIEL: Yes. I finally had a reconciliation with my mother. I put up altars, and when I go away on tour and when I’m working away, I carry all my stuff. And so, I put up this altar for my mother, and it happened again because my kids, I say kids, you know, they’re your age. Something happened, and I can’t remember now, and I remember saying, “Did you smudge? Did you do that?” and I said, “Well, it seems to me, it’s grandma’s birthday and we really have to do something heavy here.” So, they called up Monique [Mojica]. They called David and my sister Elizabeth [Lisa Mayo], and Kevin and Muriel, and Josephine and Mouse and all of them. They were in one place, and I was in Chicago with Gloria [Miguel]. And Monique was in Toronto, and we all decided at a certain hour we would have our feast, and that’s what we did. And I put up an altar to my mother in my apartment. And my sister came in, and she brought flowers. We put the spirit plate, everything on this altar. So later on, I went to the altar, and I found myself talking to this altar and saying, “I want to thank you for protecting my children because you have always protected my children. I know you protected my children because they talk about you. So, I have to thank you for this, and that I had to think that it’s time to let go of all the anger that I’ve placed on you and you’ve placed on me.” I remember doing this and smudging and lighting the tobacco and everything, and I was able to reconcile this craziness with my mother. It was hard because I’m the youngest, right? And she expected me to always take care of her, so that’s part of legacy. You see that? You know, that’s part of legacy. That’s part of her responsibility towards my kids. Her responsibility towards Kevin, towards Josephine, and I feel that way about legacy. What I want to do with Spiderwoman now is not only with, it has a lot to do with my family, but I see all these young women that have stories and want to tell them. And how do you tell them? And where do you tell them? And sometimes they are working on little things, so it’s like a fifteen minute story. Sometimes it’s forty-five minutes. Sometimes it’s a production, and those are all stories. And they’re stories that are from them, that should come out. It’s from their legacies. It’s legacies upon legacies upon legacies. And that’s what I see now. I see that my journey is almost over, maybe if it’s good, it’s another twenty years [laughing].

TOM: You can do a lot of damage in twenty years. [laughter]

MURIEL: Yeah, so I see that my journey now is to collect these stories, to collect these women, and show these women, you know, work with them. I mean, I work with all these kids at CIT [Center for Indigenous Theatre at Trent University], so they know my method of working and so on. But these other young women, and it isn’t that I advertise or anything, people find me. These women find me and say they want to work with me. And I say, “Fine. Get a grant.” [Laughing] I’m doing things free. It’s true. I’m doing things for free, for a hat, or a supper. But, I think it’s important for all these people to pull out their stuff and examine it because I don’t see any other way for Native people to go on. And also, here in New York, I think that we have to really raise the profile of Native people in theater in New York. So, that’s my other thing that I’m really thinking about. I want to do little things like I did there with Gloria, and keep on doing them, and doing them more frequently. And then do maybe a small festival of one-woman shows like that, and just, you know, talk about being Native in New York. I mean there are people that have been here for a long time, and families that have been here for a long time that have been in theater.

— Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock)
— Tom Pearson (Coharie/Tsalagi)

Originally published as part of The Native Theater Journal.

“Legacy and the Persistence of Memory: A Conversation with Muriel Miguel” © 2009 by Tom Pearson. All rights reserved.