The burial rites at the heart of Sophocles’s famous tragedy Antigone can seem arcane to many contemporary Western audiences. But a new adaptation at Los Angeles’s Native Voices, Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni, reimagines the play as a complicated, humanizing tragedy about a Nez Perce family living in our nation’s capital, and caught between the pressures of the outside world and a nationalist party that threatens to silence their history. Merging Nez Perce storytelling with the struggle over ancestors’ remains being held in museums, the play is being performed in one of those contested museums, in a space what was formerly the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Nov. 8-24.
Beth (Nez Perce) joined the production’s director, Madeline Sayet (Mohegan), and Native Voices artistic director DeLanna Studi (Cherokee) in conversation recently on the relevance of Beth’s work and Antíkoni’s themes at this moment in time.
Madeline Sayet: Beth, what inspired you to write this particular adaptation of Antigone?
Beth Piatote: When I first wrote it, I wasn’t thinking about writing a play; I was writing a story that took the form of a play. I was interested in how Sophocles’ Antigone, which poses the “universal” question of what the living owe the dead, could address the problem of Native ancestral remains held in museums. The precipitating event for me was the uncovering of the remains of the Ancient One/Kennewick Man in the Columbia River in 1996, and my frustration that state institutions and anthropologists refused to listen to the Columbia River tribal communities who were immediately advocating for his return and reburial. But of course the issue of repatriation is much larger and ongoing. Artistically, the adaptation was also a chance to put two ancient story traditions in conversation, by replacing the Greek chorus with a chorus of aunties who tell Nez Perce stories from our tradition.