📆 Thursday, November 14th – Saturday, November 16th
🎟 Tickets start at $20
📍 On the Boards: 100 W Roy St, Seattle
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the United States government violently separated Indigenous children from their communities and put them into government and church-run boarding schools to forcibly assimilate them into Anglo-American culture. Over the decades, tens of thousands of children experienced physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse as these schools tortured and punished them from speaking their languages and practicing Native customs. In many cases, some of these children were never heard from again. In October this year, President Biden issued a formal apology from the federal government for the “sin” of these boarding schools, saying that “frankly, there’s no excuse that this apology took 50 years to make.”
Artist and performer Timothy White Eagle’s latest work, Indian School, grapples with that violent history by exploring assimilation, identity, resilience, and the impact of generational trauma on belonging. The piece draws on White Eagle’s own story of being an Indigenous kid adopted by a white family as well as that of his grandfather, who was a boarding school survivor. “I started thinking about my own experience of trying to reconnect with an understanding of tribal worldview as an adult. Trying to understand what it means to be native, what the traditional viewpoints of the world would be,” White Eagle said in an interview with Seattle contemporary performance venue On the Boards.
Using an immersive audio-visual design and co-created with dramaturg/director and writer Hatlo, Indian School places viewers right in the thick of personal and historical memory. It should be noted, this performance features non-traditional seating. For those looking for a COVID-safe(r) performance, there are tickets for a mask-required dress rehearsal available at a discounted rate.
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