Miguel, Muriel

Indigenous rodeo riders and Wild West actors all gathered at an unassuming townhouse in Boerum Hill. Listening to the grown-ups under the kitchen table, a future experimental theater director.On a quiet street in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, there’s an unassuming yellow-brick house that once served as an unofficial community center for Native Americans in show business. The theater director Muriel Miguel grew up there, and lives there still. When she was a child, in the 1930s and ’40s, Native dancers and actors from all around the country would stop by the house while working in New York. Some would stick around for months, or even years.Ms. Miguel still remembers sitting under the kitchen table and listening to her parents trading songs and stories with these visitors. Sitting Bull’s grandson Crazy Bull, a national archery champion who advised Rodgers and Hammerstein on their production of “Annie Get Your Gun,” was an occasional presence. Douglas Grant, a trick rider from South Dakota, got stranded in New York while on tour with the rodeo and ended up staying with the Miguels for two decades. And then there were the Big Mountains, a family of Mohawk, Comanche and Apache dancers who lived in the back of a gift shop at a so-called Indian village in Wild West City, a theme park that still lies off Route 206 in New Jersey.As a young woman, Ms. Miguel mostly felt embarrassed by the work her parents and their friends did for money — jobs that required them to dress up in ceremonial costumes and act out white people’s fantasies of how Indians behaved. But now, at 84, she wonders if the fake Indian villages and Wild West shows of that era inadvertently contributed to the survival of real Native culture, if only by bringing such a vibrant community together in New York.At a time when the authorities out West were forbidding Native people from practicing their traditions, Ms. Miguel’s family and friends shared their songs and stories freely with one another, planting what Ms. Miguel described as kernels of inspiration in their children. “Today, I’m collecting the corn,” she said. “And it’s overwhelming.”Ms. Miguel during a break for rehearsals of “Misdemeanor Dream.”Adrienne Grunwald for The New York TimesMs. Miguel and her two older sisters, Gloria (95) and Lisa Mayo (who died in 2013 at 89), have often been described as the matriarchs of Indigenous theater in North America.“They made a space for so many people and companies,” Penny Couchie, an actor and choreographer of Ojibwe and Mohawk ancestry, said. “They made no apologies for the way that we tell stories.”In recent weeks, Ms. Miguel has been scrambling to finish preparing for the debut of her latest production, “Misdemeanor Dream,” a collaboration between her company, Spiderwoman Theater, and Aanmitaagzi, an arts group led by Ms. Couchie and her husband, Sid Bobb, on Nipissing First Nation territory in Ontario. The show, which will open on March 10 at La MaMa, the experimental theater in the East Village, represents the culmination of her life’s work so far, she said.Ms. Miguel has been working in the world of experimental theater since the ’60s, when she was an actor in the Open Theater, a pioneering avant-garde ensemble founded by the visionary director Joseph Chaikin. Like many of her past projects, the new play explores the ways in which old stories shape the lives of Indigenous people in the present, for better and worse. Inspired by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” it takes place in a magical realm where fairies, humans and other beings share stories drawn from the performers’ ancestral traditions and personal memories — a father disappearing in the wilderness of northern Quebec, a mother spurning her daughter because she’s so afraid of losing her.The performers, who trace their roots to a dozen Indigenous nations within the borders of the United States, Canada and the Philippines, created the piece using the “story weaving” method. Spiderwoman Theater developed the technique in the 1970s, when the group was a fixture of the downtown theater scene. Over the years, the company has used it to intertwine narratives about everything from family violence to cultural appropriation with pop songs and bawdy jokes and dreamlike images.“It’s important to tell these stories, but they have to be done in a certain way where people don’t feel like they’re being hit over the head,” Ms. Miguel said. “You can tell a painful story and then tell an awful disgusting joke and give a raspberry. You can take things and turn them around.”On a recent Monday, Ms. Miguel took a break from her rehearsal schedule to ride around her neighborhood, telling stories about her own childhood. She sat in the back of a 2012 Toyota Matrix, a red leather hat trimmed with wolf fur resting on the seat beside her, while her wife, Deborah Ratelle, handled the driving. Ms. Miguel has short, silvery hair and a cascading, shoulder-shaking laugh. She wore turquoise rings on most of her fingers and had on mismatched earrings — one turquoise, the other made of oyster shell. “I don’t like sameness,” she said.Heading down Court Street, she pointed at Cobble Hill Cinema, a longtime movie theater that used to be called the Lido. “That was one of the places that my father used to stand outside in his outfit to ballyhoo all these movies,” she recalled. Her father, a Kuna from Panama, would supplement the money he earned as a dockworker by donning the war-bonnet of a Plains Indian chief and beckoning people into the theater to see the latest John Wayne picture. He had lots of jobs like that: playing a generic Indian at Thanksgiving pageants, performing at ceremonies commemorating the supposed sale of Manhattan to the Dutch.In the summer, he would take Ms. Miguel’s older sisters to Golden City, a long-since-forgotten amusement park in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, where they would dance and sing and sit around in teepees. Gloria, who plays the role of The Elder in “Misdemeanor Dream,” dreaded these outings. “People would come and look and say, “Oh, look at the Indians, they’re eating spaghetti,’” she recalled. It turned her off from doing any theatrical work that involved her heritage until, as a divorced mother of two in her late 40s, she joined her sisters in establishing Spiderwoman Theater. “We got to tell our stories our own way,” she said.“Misdemeanor Dream” features Ms. Miguel’s sister Gloria, in the role of The Elder.Adrienne Grunwald for The New York TimesThe Toyota stopped outside P.S. 146, a massive brick building with an imposing stone archway. Gazing through the car window, Ms. Miguel remembered a social studies teacher telling the class that Indians were a thing of the past. “I got up and I said, ‘No, we’re here,” she recalled. She laughed at the memory, her shoulders bouncing. “I had such a big mouth.”That attitude of spirited defiance ripples through her work. When Spiderwoman Theater was formed, in 1975, she conceived of it as a feminist response to the sexism that she says was plaguing the American Indian Movement at the time. The company’s first play, “Women in Violence,” was a vaudevillian clown show that addressed the abuse of women, something that she and her sisters had all endured. “Somehow I was taught that you have to push back,” she said. “Maybe it was my sisters — they taught me that I could do anything I wanted, that I could be anything I wanted.”Ms. Miguel’s family in her mother’s traditional Rappahannock dress, circa 1930.via Gloria MiguelOn the corner of State and Nevins Streets, Ms. Miguel noted that the surrounding blocks had once been home to a community known as Little Caughnawaga. In the first half of the 20th century, Mohawk ironworkers from Canada settled in the area while helping to build the skyscrapers that now dominate the skyline: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, Rockefeller Plaza. The Rev. David M. Cory, a white pastor who learned Mohawk and gave sermons in the language, allowed Ms. Miguel and her friends to rehearse authentic Native dances in the basement of a church a few blocks away. They formed a dance group, the Little Eagles, that eventually grew into the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, a widely known company that still performs and teaches at schools, theaters and museums.As the car pulled up to the corner where that church once stood, Ms. Miguel groaned. “Ay, yi, yi,” she said. A wooden construction barrier guarded a white condo complex that would not have looked out of place in Miami. Ms. Miguel got out and approached a young man who stood outside the gate in a hard hat, smoking a Newport. “Excuse me,” she said. “What happened to the church that used to be here?”“It got abandoned a few years back,” he said, in an accent that proved to be Turkish.“How sad,” she said. “When I was growing up, a lot of the people who lived here and on the next blocks were Native people. Indian people.”He nodded politely.“It was really wonderful,” Ms. Miguel said.She spent the next 10 minutes regaling him with interesting facts and anecdotes about that time. She praised the minister (“a socialist”) who let them use the space to dance and laughed about how the ironworkers would pile into their cars for the 12-hour trip back to their reservation every weekend, switching seats while driving so they wouldn’t have to waste time pulling over. “Crazy men!” she said.The contractor gave her a contemplative look. “I didn’t know there were Native people living in this neighborhood,” he remarked.She studied his face. “You didn’t know?” She shared a few more details and thanked him for listening. Walking back to the car, she called out, “Tell people the story.” More