INTRODUCTION

Tombs of the Vanishing Indian is a work on the cusp. It balances on edges keener than a straight razor and, like the imagery of water and tears the play paints, it rushes at us in a torrent. It is at its inception already a canonical work.

Tombs of the Vanishing Indian lives in between spaces, between our intellect and our emotions, working its way past our constructs and reasoning deeply into our bones. It is a play that upon first reading already insinuates itself along the pathways of our nerves, as it drives itself relentlessly towards the harrowing conclusions that its characters must inevitably face. There is no place for us to escape its breakneck velocity. In its first scene, this dominant theme emerges − flight. Characters running for their lives. The sound of feet running from certain danger. Flashlights. Darkness. And blood mixed with water.

Just as in her earlier work, playwright Marie Clements carves theatrical space to her will. Three sisters. Three spaces. Three glass rooms. Dioramas. Glass cages. Clements, like a surgeon, opens American history unflinchingly. In the life of one family, we see the displacement of communities, the legacy of Indian boarding schools and missions, and finally the forced sterilization programs run by the Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1950s and 1970s. Andrea Smith, in her 2005 book Conquest, examines this attack on women and the government’s use of “sexual violence as a tool of genocide.” Native women were targeted precisely because their “ability to reproduce continued to [stand] in the way of the [ongoing] conquest of Native lands” (p. 79). In her use of theatrical space, Clements helps us understand that these women’s bodies − these vital spaces − are in fact another battlefront for the continuing wars of Manifest Destiny and control.

From the pages of Tombs of the Vanishing Indian, the land literally leaps out at the reader, guiding us into knowledge and situating us not so much in a darkened theatre in a northern city but in the deserts of the West. Commissioned in 2003 by Native Voices at the Autry and developed in association with them at the Native Voices at the Autry Playwrights Retreat in Los Angeles in 2004 and 2005, the work is an extension of that community and its sun-drenched landscapes.

Even the language of the land emerges rightfully in Clements’s writing. The Gabrielino dialect, brought powerfully into play by the ghost of the three sisters’ mother, evokes much more than the culture from which the daughters were taken. It becomes the music of the play, a threnody for an entire generation. But it is easy to look at this use of language in terms of loss of culture − which of the sisters learn it, speak it, once they are cut away from the source? In Tombs of the Vanishing Indian, the use of Gabrielino is far more complex. Again, it is one of the means the playwright uses to slip into the in-between spaces of her characters’ lives, into the spaces Clements always leaves for her actors to discover. Gabrielino, in the scenes with Detective Fullen, in particular, becomes a shield which The Mother’s ghost uses to protect the daughters from the deafening crash of cultures. The Mother says, “Keep me inside of you.” The language is what is inside of them, a gift from their mother, and, in theatrical terms, it is the vehicle through which we see their bond come alive onstage.

Of course, Los Angeles, where the play is set, is diverse. Spanish mixes easily with Gabrielino. And the life of the three sisters mixes inevitably with that other culture: Hollywood. Clements delights in opening up the wounds brought about by Hollywood’s history, which many indigenous scholars have also explored in recent years. Much of the play’s ironic humour emerges from this intersection. Miranda, one of the sisters, remarks to a hack film director, “you wouldn’t know dark and mysterious if it licked your behind.” Half of the scholarship about Indians on film has just been boiled down to one gleeful sentence.

Clements’s potent work will naturally draw comparisons to another play about three sisters. And, yes, there are a few similarities − exquisitely drawn characters, compromised situations, and women searching for something better, but this play is written from the trenches, from the other side of the tracks. It is a clarion cry to rid ourselves of false consciousness and to turn ourselves towards the oncoming flood. This play brings painful knowledge about our collective past but gives us warning to root ourselves in it − to find the shields still embedded therein − or risk being washed away by the deluge.

− MICHAEL GREYEYES