Christopher Cartmill

In 2006 Nebraska's Lied Center for the Performing Arts commissioned Christopher Cartmill to write a play about Standing Bear, the Ponca chief who sued the United States in 1879 and won with the judge declaring "an Indian is a person" (and thus entitled to its rights and protection under the law - which led to part of the Ponca tribe coming back to its previous lands after being walked to Oklahoma/Indian Territory a few years earlier). The play was named "Home Land" (not available in printed show more form) but Cartmill did not produce just the one play - he created a few solo performances about the writing of the play which then turned into this book which was then used for a solo performance - all of them based on the notes and messages (dispatches) he wrote (and sent sometimes) while researching Standing Bear - he tried to interview as many people as he could in Nebraska, both Native and white.

This book is an edited version of these dispatches - excerpts of a diary of a type, interspersed with sections needed to connect the story. There is story in there (Standing Bear's story) but even if that is always at the center of the book, the main focus is different.

Cartmill used to live in Nebraska so in a way he was going home - a home where noone was waiting for him anymore. He went there to write a play about an Indian tribe going home and ended up trying to understand what home is actually. The path to that goes through understanding the locals, their connection with the old times (including sifting through stories that merge different historical figures together) and their current lives and traditions. And somewhere in there emerges the focus of the book: can someone own a story and who has the write to tell a story.

These days it is almost modern to discuss cultural appropriation (and disagree with it). This diary does not go all the way there but the topics are similar - if there is a famous person who had lived in your neighborhood, do you have the right to tell their story? Can you control who told the story? Or do the story belong to the people from the same tribe as Standing Bear? Cartmill never finds an answer but he writes the play anyway - a story belongs to everyone. And you are left wondering why would people from a different tribe think that they have a better claim to the story (even when they put the wrong Standing Bear on their website) than a white man who is trying to find all the information he can. Both can be considered appropriation and yet, just one of them is frowned upon usually.

Somewhere in there, there is also the poverty and the real people who still live in the area - white and Native American, with their own dramas. History does not pay the bills, neither it is something everyone thinks about all the time. And while writing about the past, this present becomes the important one - most of the diary has nothing to do with the play or the Poncas - it is about Nebraska of today.

If you are looking for a book about Standing Bear, that's not the book for you. I am not even sure how exactly to define it - it is almost a slice of life work - it deals with home and stories and how they relate to each other and to people's lives. show less