Imagining Native Nationhood: The Art and Activism of Mary Kathryn Nagle's Manahatta and Sovereignty

Abstract

Indigenous feminist Mishuana Goeman (Seneca) refers to the engagement with the past to determine an indigenous future as (re)mapping, endorsing literary nationalist Robert Warrior’s “assertion that determining our future depends on ‘critically reading our own tradition[, which] allows us to see some of the mistakes of the past as we analyze the problems of the present’” (Goeman 13). Following Goeman’s model, this paper regards the parallel experiences of the past to explain present issues facing Cherokee Nation and the future possibilities for sovereignty. Cherokee playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta (2013) and Sovereignty (2018) (re)invoke elements of traditional Cherokee women’s roles, Indigenous feminisms, and literary nationalism to (re)claim Cherokee sovereignty. Mary Kathryn Nagle’s plays are rooted in Indigenous feminist stories like those of Selu and Núñ'Yunu'Wĭ, which avow the power of women and their commitment to keeping their communities alive. Drawing on the history of Native theater’s role in Indigenous feminist activism, Manahatta and Sovereignty advocate for Indigenous feminist concerns that transcend time by melding past and present temporalities, (re)writing and (re)righting dominant binary narratives of assimilation or death, by presenting modern Native people as agents of their cultural sovereignty. Nagle positions her protagonists as sites of political protest who (re)stake political authority over their own cultures and bodies, and by extension their nations. Though both Manahatta and Sovereignty were produced before the U.S. Supreme Court heard or decided McGirt, the plays anticipate and engage with tensions surrounding state, tribal, and federal jurisdictions, and thus, sovereignty. Ultimately Nagle imagines an Indigenous feminist future for Cherokee sovereignty that simultaneously tells and (re)creates itself internally and communally, having been and continuing to be without the need for external recognition.