Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Threads Of Sisterhood
Feminist theater founder explores connections
The founder of the oldest Native feminist theater group in North America — and likely the world, Muriel Miguel speculates — will give a retrospective spotlight talk today at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville. The lecture, which is certain to be part performance as well, will trace the journey Miguel and her two sisters have taken over the last 40-plus years in trailblazing Native and feminist voices in progressive storytelling with Spiderwoman Theater.
“When I started it, I had a lot of concern and rage in me about how women were being treated,” Miguel shares. “It was violence walking down the street; it was violence coming from men just being in a truck and thinking they were able to say awful things to you. And I started to think about anger and rage and how rage doesn’t do anything except stop you from doing something.”
And that’s where it began. The company’s first piece, “Women in Violence,” took the group all over Europe following their North American debut, and Miguel recalls the polarizing effect the material had on audiences.
“It was amazing because women were coming up to us and really talking to us, and it was really important. [But] what was happening in Europe, is [people] were saying this is only a phenomenon that happens in the States,” she says of those earliest performances. “One of the things we realized, I think, at that point was how the political part was so strong with our storytelling. We realized how loud our voices were. And to us, it was a surprise that these people could be that shocked at women being beaten and women being put down.”
Unfortunately, Miguel says that first piece Spiderwoman performed more than 40 years ago is still relevant today, but particularly so with Native women and women of color. The gap in social understanding is slowly being bridged with campaigns like #MeToo and the recent efforts in the women’s movement, but Miguel maintains that many still don’t fully comprehend the violence and injustice Native women and women of color still disproportionately face.
“We’ve been yelling about this for a very long time. So I think that is a goal — how do you show people? How do you get people to change their ways? You have to listen,” she says. “You have to listen to the other women. You have to really figure out, how do you connect the stories? You have to look around you at what’s going on.
“If you’re talking about abuse and sexual abuse and beatings and everything,” Miguel poses, “how do you shine a light on it? And how do you do it without people calling you victim? Because you’re standing up for your rights, you’re not a victim. So that’s part of the goal, also.”
That idea of connection is so fundamental to the ideals of Spiderwoman, it encompasses every part of the troupe — including the name. Spiderwoman is a creator in Native creation stories, which tend to “go on forever” and cover a lot of things, Miguel says with a laugh. But the way she weaves the stories together, just as the women in the theater troupe do, demonstrates how everything is connected.
“How do you use a word?” Miguel muses. “And how important is that word? How does it connect to the next story? This is what we’ve been doing all this time. And that’s the goal, is to look under the rocks, and to take off the surface. But at the same time, how do you [follow] the threads and connect them to some place else?”