Mary Kathryn Nagle – författare

A gripping journey from the fur trade of the 1600s to the stock trade of today, Mary Kathryn Nagle'sManahattatells the story of Jane Snake, a brilliant young Native American woman with a Stanford MBA. Jane reconnects with her ancestral homeland, known as Manahatta, when she moves from her home with the Delaware Nation in Anadarko, Oklahoma to New York for a job at a major investment bank just before the financial crisis of 2008. Jane's struggle to reconcile her new life with the expectations and traditions of the family she left behind is powerfully interwoven with the heartbreaking history of how the Lenape were forced from their land. Both old and new Manahatta converge in a brutal lesson about the dangers of living in a society where there's no such thing as enough.

Sovereignty unfolds over two parallel timelines. In present-day Oklahoma, a young Cherokee lawyer, Sarah Ridge Polson, builds a Supreme Court case with colleague Jim Ross to restore tribal jurisdiction over a rape trial. Their collaboration is juxtaposed with scenes from 1835, when the Cherokee nation was eight hundred miles to the east in the southern Appalachians. That year, Sarah's and Jim's ancestors, historic Cherokee rivals, were bitterly divided over a proposed treaty with the administration of Andrew Jackson.A direct descendant of John Ridge, Nagle has penned a play that twists and turns from violent outbursts to healing monologues, illuminating a provocative double meaning for the sovereignty of both tribal territory and women's bodies. Nagle's ancestor in real life, Ridge attended boarding school in Connecticut, where he fell in love with and married the schoolmaster's daughter, Flora. Sovereignty places him at the center of a bitter schism between two leading Cherokee families—his own and the family of Cherokee chief John Ross—over Jackson's Treaty of New Echota, which led to the nation's removal to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears.Taking as her point of departure the story of one passionate lawyer's defense of the rights of her people to prosecute non-natives who commit crimes on reservations, Sovereignty opens up into an expansive play about the circular continuity of history, human memory, and the power of human relationships.

Leading scholars collect, introduce, and contextualize a diverse array of newly-published contemporary Native American plays.Featuring works that engage with the major themes, artists, and plays of Native American theatre, Indigenous Spaces places a special emphasis on the aesthetics, cultural meanings, and political goals of the genre as itinteracts with the changing needs of Native North American peoples.The first collection of plays from multiple Native American playwrights to be published in over a decade, this anthology presents new plays by key Indigenous theatre-makers across Native North America who are currently writing and producing a range of theatrical works. From a reimagining of Peter Pan in Madeline Sayet’s The Neverland, to the incredible true story of a 900-mile odyssey in And So We Walked by DeLanna Studi, these plays pay homage to the wide breadth of Native Theatre.Each chapter opens with critical commentary written by the editors, who weave the play’s dramaturgy into broader discussions of Native storytelling and performative movements. Individually, these pieces offer exciting opportunities for performance and study; when collected together, the plays elicit an even more nuanced socio-historical, philosophical understanding of Native Theatre across the 21st century. The volume directly compliments Methuen Drama's Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance: Indigenous Spaces.

Leading scholars collect, introduce, and contextualize a diverse array of newly-published contemporary Native American plays.Featuring works that engage with the major themes, artists, and plays of Native American theatre, Indigenous Spaces places a special emphasis on the aesthetics, cultural meanings, and political goals of the genre as itinteracts with the changing needs of Native North American peoples.The first collection of plays from multiple Native American playwrights to be published in over a decade, this anthology presents new plays by key Indigenous theatre-makers across Native North America who are currently writing and producing a range of theatrical works. From a reimagining of Peter Pan in Madeline Sayet's The Neverland, to the incredible true story of a 900-mile odyssey in And So We Walked by DeLanna Studi, these plays pay homage to the wide breadth of Native Theatre.Each chapter opens with critical commentary written by the editors, who weave the play's dramaturgy into broader discussions of Native storytelling and performative movements. Individually, these pieces offer exciting opportunities for performance and study; when collected together, the plays elicit an even more nuanced socio-historical, philosophical understanding of Native Theatre across the 21st century. The volume directly compliments Methuen Drama's Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance: Indigenous Spaces.