Timothy White Eagle’s ‘Indian School’ Immerses Audiences in the Artist’s Personal and Cultural History

Multi-hyphenate performance artist Timothy White Eagle is back with his new solo performance, Indian School, which premieres at On the Boards this Thursday, Nov. 14. The piece immerses audiences in White Eagle’s personal exploration into assimilation, capitalism, the Colorado River, identity, displacement, and the unjust treatment of Indigenous people. 

Primarily, the work has three major threads: White Eagle’s life as an Indigenous kid adopted by a working-class white family, his Mohave grandfather’s experience at an Indian boarding school in the early 1900s, and the importance of the Colorado River and its subsequent damming and manipulation. As in White Eagle’s previous work, these threads aren’t simply examined and then set down — rather, they are woven together to create a rich tapestry that’s both personal and universal. 

“I found information about my grandfather … and it’s this interesting story about him being forcibly put into the Phoenix Indian School in about 1915,” White Eagle said about the genesis of Indian School. “I had been wanting to do something based on my own experience being adopted from a Native family and raised by a white family in a small Washington town, and these stories kind of blended together.”

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Indigenous children were violently abducted from their families of origin and forced to attend government-run residential schools to assimilate into white culture. Boarding school survivors say that punishment for speaking their Native languages or participating in their Native customs was akin to torture. After enduring years of abuse, White Eagle’s grandfather returned to his traditional homeland and was involved in another project of colonialism: damming the Colorado River, which the Mohave people had lived in direct relationship with for millennia.

“I thought that was a really interesting complexity that these folks have been forcibly assimilated into this Western way of being, and then there's this huge opportunity for Native men to have jobs out where there hadn't been a lot of jobs historically,” said White Eagle. “It’s an interesting parallel to the first internment of Native children, that [colonialists] were also damming and changing the way the river moves in order to control it.”

Although these individual story threads span hundreds of years, even in discussing the piece, the artist sees these stories as inextricably bound together. Rather than trying to tell this tale linearly in Indian School, White Eagle intertwines past, present, and future simultaneously so they all exist in the same plane. This approach is reflected in a 20-foot giant medallion that he will perform on top of, a map painted with history, archetypes, ancestors, symbolism, and the like.

“The idea came from one of the things I read when doing my research. A Mohave elder said, ‘Mohave stories are like maps, not books.’ I started thinking about storytelling as a map of things existing simultaneously rather than linearly and that affected some of how I put the show together,” White Eagle reflected. “With the medallion, I was making an effigy of the entire performance that’s present all at once.”

Although White Eagle is the only person onstage, Indian School is the result of deep collaboration between himself and a suite of talented artists. Co-created with dramaturg, director, writer, and frequent collaborator Hatlo, the performance also features an immersive video design by DB Amorin and sound design by Crystal Cortez as well as live vocals and instruments by Olivia Komahcheet.

All of this is in service of placing viewers within the story, right alongside White Eagle. Instead of a traditional divide between audience and performer, the audience will sit in a gallery-style arrangement, with seating on either side of the stage so that they will face one another as White Eagle performs. For the artist, it was important to have viewers incorporated into the story itself.

“All of my work in the last 10 years, at least on some level, has a relationship to building community. So I like the idea of coming into a room together to share an experience and to amplify that shared experience through a more intimate connection than a traditional theater setup allows,” said White Eagle. “It's a powerful thing to look across an audience and to see somebody who's seeing the same thing you are, to see their face and how they're responding to it. That becomes part of the show.”

Timothy White Eagle’s “Indian School”is at On the Boards from Thursday, Nov. 14, to Saturday, Nov. 16. Tickets are selling out quickly, and you can reserve yours over at On the Boards’ website.