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Co-written by Theresa May and Marta Lu Clifford during a five-year collaboration, the story is a take on modern Native life. It will be staged at the Very Little Theatre.
In the new play “BlueJay’s Canoe,” actress and co-writer Marta Lu Clifford plays Goldie, an Indigenous woman who speaks the Chinook Wawa language on a fictional Willamette Valley radio station.
Her lines are not translated for the audience. It’s a deliberate choice to leave theatergoers curious, and a comment on how European and American cultures aren’t entitled to a piece of information just because they speak English.
But for Clifford, registered as a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and who also has Chinook and Cree heritage, acting in Chinook Wawa has been difficult. She’s not yet fluent and only started studying it online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m still learning it,” said Clifford, who is an elder-in-residence at the University of Oregon’s Native American and Indigenous Studies program. “It’s sad, because some of the lines I’m struggling with are trying to remember the sentences in Chinook Wawa, and I wrote them.”
She’s not alone: BlueJay, the radio host protagonist of “BlueJay’s Canoe” and nephew to Goldie, also doesn’t speak the language, a sign of generational language loss.
“BlueJay’s Canoe,” which opens this week at Eugene’s Very Little Theatre, is a reflection on modern Native life. The play is set as the COVID-19 pandemic, Labor Day wildfires, Black Lives Matter protests and more take place while the radio station, KMAS — a play on “camas” — broadcasts.
The play, a partnership between Clifford and co-writer Theresa May’s illioo Native Theatre company and the Very Little Theatre, is also intended to explore a specific challenge: Can a play unite the conventions of Western theater — scene-based, Aristotelian climactic structure — with Native theater’s traditional oral storytelling and vignette-based approach?
“That’s the question that we’re asking,” May said. “We hope the answer is yes.”
A creative partnership years in the making
“BlueJay’s Canoe” is the final product of five years of work and more than a decade of artistic collaboration from the two women.
They first met 14 years ago for another theater project, “Salmon Is Everything,” where May worked with tribes of the Klamath River watershed to develop a play in response to a mass fish-kill of Chinook salmon.
May put out a call looking for actresses to play a tribal elder named Rose in that play. Clifford’s niece was working at the Grand Ronde tribal office at the time and recommended her aunt check it out. Clifford remembers walking into the theater, approaching the friendliest person — who happened to be May — and asking about the role. May handed her a script and announced to the theater they had found their Rose.
That began a long-running creative partnership as colleagues and friends. Their work together included teaching Native theater at the University of Oregon and working on the local installations of the REDress Project (which memorializes missing and murdered Indigenous women).
May has no Indigenous heritage. As a white woman, she is conscious of what her role looks like when it comes to Native storytelling. “It’s a way of giving back,” May said. “How can I use my skills to help repair some of the damage done by my own ancestors, probably?”
Clifford said she and May have an established, mutually respectful relationship that many people who go to tribal elders don’t take the time to cultivate.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m a tribal elder, and I’m sitting on a shelf somewhere, and people want to come and check me out,” she said. “Don’t let the tribal elder you want to work with feel that way. You form a relationship. You take them to coffee, you buy them a goodie.”
Writing ‘BlueJay’s Canoe’
It was actually a “goodie” from May that gave the play its name. May and Clifford were sitting in Eugene’s Hendricks Park in 2020, talking through what the play should look like, when a blue jay flitted down and started pecking at Clifford’s apple fritter.
“Blue jay wants to be in the play,” Clifford said to May.
Other jaunts in nature, specifically through visits to the Willamette Confluence, where two forks of the Willamette River join east of Eugene, was vital. It inspired the play’s relationship with the land and water, with a canoe voyage as an important coming-of-age marker for Native youth like Xak, the radio station’s intern.
Clifford said writing “BlueJay’s Canoe” came after years of fielding questions from students in her and May’s Native theater classes, like why a boarding school would be something to run away from.
While the play is doing some educational work in that sense, many elements — like the lines in Chinook Wawa — are left uninterpreted. May said she wants the play to spark curiosity, and to show the importance and presence of Indigenous stories in everyday modern life.
“These are not things that are vestiges of the past,” May said. “These are active. All of our lives are governed by the stories that we tell and the stories we believe.”
How to see ‘BlueJay’s Canoe’
“BlueJay’s Canoe” opens at the Very Little Theatre, 2350 Hilyard St., Eugene on Friday, Nov. 7, and runs through Sunday, Nov. 23. Multiple performances are already sold out; remaining tickets are available online for $20. A talk back with creatives from the play will follow the Sunday, Nov. 16, matinee performance.
