Meet the woman who founded a theater group to tell Native American stories to Native American audiences

Rhiana Yazzie launched New Native Theatre to tell Native stories primarily to Native audiences. And while NNT is based in the Twin Cities and has staged many productions in St. Paul, Yazzie’s work in theater frequently takes her across the country. Eye On St. Paul caught up with Yazzie while she was in Los Angeles for a project to talk about why she founded New Native Theatre with a focus “on nurturing and developing Native American artists” of all ages and experience levels.

Yazzie is a member of the Navajo Nation and an award-winning playwright who has seen her work performed on stages from Alaska to Mexico. She was a Bush Foundation fellow in 2018 and the year before she was recognized with a Sally Award. Her first feature film, “A Winter Love,” has been screened at numerous film festivals.

This interview was edited for length.

Q: How did you get involved in theater?

A: I grew up in Farmington, New Mexico, and Albuquerque. I was encouraged to be creative, and there was a professor at the University of New Mexico who visited my high school and was giving advice to folks. I decided to apply for a playwriting scholarship, and I ended up getting it. It was small, like $400. But that opened the door to becoming a theater major. And I had a professor who really encouraged me, and I really learned about the art of theater and playwriting especially. I just really, really adored it. I went on to grad school in Los Angeles and, ultimately, I came to Minnesota.

Q: What brought you to the Twin Cities?

A: I came to the Playwrights’ Center on a Jerome Fellowship in 2006. That is a national fellowship for emerging playwrights.

A: We have rented Gremlin Theatre quite a bit. Like many theater companies, we do not have [our own] space in the Twin Cities. We will rent spaces all around the Cities. But we also produce quite a bit of work in Native organizations and have done site-specific presentations. We did tour a play to 10 native organizations in St. Paul and Minneapolis. And we have in the past produced plays at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. So, it’s safe to say we perform all around the Twin Cities. Our voice is about serving Native American artists, wherever in the state of Minnesota or the upper Midwest. That’s what we do.

Q: What are the themes you come back to?

A: I’m very interested to know why people get into conflict. I really like absurdist theater, and part of that was people trying to understand how to communicate. But ultimately, the stories were about people’s inability to communicate.

Growing up Navajo, I understood that there’s a different worldview that we have as Navajo people interacting in the world, and I always found cultural differences really intensely interesting. I’ve got a play that’s being produced in Washington, D.C., at Mosaic Theater Company about Nancy Reagan. I’m also interested in politics, and stories of women. That’s the reason I wrote a play about Nancy Reagan, because there’s an interesting intersection of Indian country and the whole story about the Reagan administration.

Q: Talk about the local Native theater scene.

Q: What was your first production?

A: We did a series of events. The first event I did was a lunchtime reading of the book “Custer Died for Your Sins.” Vine Deloria [Jr.] is a very important well-known author who started publishing in 1968 and has many books about Native American philosophy and talks about America in general. It’s sort of political. He is a pretty major voice in the American Indian movement. He was based in Minneapolis for quite some time.

And then our very first full play production was a community-created, devised work called “The Dreaming Bundle” in December of 2010.

Q: Is it accurate to say New Native Theatre planted the seeds for Native theater here?