Ty Defoe:
Skeleton Canoe

AnEssay by Skye Strauss

Before the work-in-progress performance of Skeleton Canoe, presented as part of the 2022 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, the production’s dramaturg, cultural consultant and elder Mark Denning (Oneida/Menominee/Mille Lacs Ojibwe/Delaware/Lenape/Mohican) walked around the makeshift performance space—set up in the middle of the gymnasium at the American Indian Center of Chicago—carrying smudge. Watching the smoke rise reminded everyone present that storytelling is more than entertainment—it is also a sacred act. In the multilingual greeting that followed, Denning acknowledged that the audience was a mix of both “insiders,” community members from the many tribal nations whose flags hung on the walls around us, and “outsiders,” a diverse crowd of puppet people from Chicago and beyond, brought together by the festival.

A drum, which had been hanging prominently displayed on the left side of the stage, became a way to transition into the flow of the performance when community members came up to play and chant. When they finished their traditional song, Ty Defoe (Oneida/Ojibwe), the writer and performer of Skeleton Canoe, began to sing a new song as a solo—eventually inviting the audience to participate in call-and-response. In that moment, I became acutely aware of my “outsider” status. I was being prompted to repeat words that, for me, had no clear meaning, and I recognized that to imitate that chant on my own would be deeply disrespectful. Yet, when issued a clear third invitation to join in—that Defoe seemed to address to all of us—it felt equally rude to refuse to sing along. Together, we magnified his voice to fill the farthest corners of the cavernous space as the story began.

Skeleton Canoe tells the tale of Nawbin, an Anishinaabe child on the brink of adolescence, who is trying to discover where they fit in. Vying for the attention of various family members, Nawbin is ignored, until the fateful moment when they break the familial peace pipe—suddenly, all eyes are on them in the worst way. Nawbin flees the house into a birch forest under the night sky, beginning an unexpected journey. A firefly guides them to a canoe stuck in the riverbed. What remains is its skeleton, the bent-wood frame with only scraps of veneer still clinging to the sides. Such is the magic of the moment that, once pulled free from the riverbed, the canoe still floats. Climbing into it, Nawbin finds themselves rushing along the river rapids and thrust underwater, where they meet a rainbow trout—also a delicate skeleton, with translucent fins both designed and fabricated by Kris Waymire—who helps Defoe present a “fish dance.”

Inside the story world of Skeleton Canoe, one specially crafted basket, with eyes cut out of the base, becomes the main character, Nawbin. Defoe as the storyteller both is and is not his main character. In some moments, he wears the basket like a mask. At others, he holds it apart from himself—allowing us to imagine the smaller stature of the unseen child. The oscillation was touching because, at times, I began to wonder where pieces of Defoe’s autobiography might be interwoven with his character’s, where precisely he knows the story from the inside out. Yet the moment of greatest magic happened between two inanimate objects. When Defoe kept the mask hovering above the exposed ribs of the birchbark boat in front of a projection screen filled with a tangle of trees and stars above a flowing river, we “saw” Nawbin sitting in the skeleton canoe. My imagination jumped at the chance to fill in the stage picture. 

Denning placed the whole production within an ancient tradition of “interacting with things.” In that sense, Skeleton Canoe joins an ongoing project that Jill Carter (Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi) describes in the abstract for an article on Indigenous performance: 

[Indigenous theatre] artists are actively mining their nations’ knowledge systems for the building materials with which to construct singularly Indigenous, nation-specific works that serve the communities and the biotas out of which those knowledge systems emerge (2016: 1).

In Carter’s article, Guna/Rappahannock performance artist Monique Mojica looks to quilted Mola, as “non-human collaborator[s],” to guide her to a dramaturgical structure for Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way (2016: 4). Thus culturally significant things become a gateway to culturally specific knowledge, helping the artist step into the flow of a story that, in an Indigenous worldview, is part of a contemporaneous past, present and future (Carter, 2016: 2). What that means becomes clearer in relation to Skeleton Canoe, not in the plot points involving the puppet fish (however beautiful) but in the presence of the smudge in the space and the drum, baskets and canoe with Defoe onstage. Those things animate not just a character but a culture. 

At first, the feeling that this is a children’s story—amply reenforced by Defoe’s friendly banter with the youngest members of the audience in the front row—seems at odds with the presence of skeletons. Yet in the context of cultural estrangement and loss, the aim is indeed to revivify. Puppetry is usually the medium through which what might otherwise be considered inanimate lives. More important, in this context, when Indigenous performance follows Indigenous belief and language, all things—even everyday objects—are “alive and invested with spirit” (Carter, 2016: 6). The respect for the objects onstage becomes about more than the “illusion of life” that puppeteers and scholars have theorized in a variety of ways, rather it becomes an act of communion with those things. Denning’s comments after the show also lent the tension between animate and inanimate, living and dead an additional gravity by talking about the imminent danger of suicide for Native and Indigenous youth. To find oneself feeling invisible, as Nawbin does, is a real and present danger. Reconnecting with the past through what is still here is instrumental to protecting the present and future.

To preserve what is sacred to “insiders” requires the team to draw boundaries around what will and will not be translated for “outsiders”—for the production to do its work, eventually touring to Indigenous communities around the United States, it must retain its cultural specificity. So some words, images and actions in the production that spoke clearly to insiders remained opaque to me as an outsider. Therefore, I was excited to see community insiders’ enthusiasm about the parts of the performance I could not have judged. A woman in a skirt adorned with ribbons and a print of leaves and animals, ostensibly an insider, praised Defoe’s fish dance in the post-show talk-back. The lesson that unfolded was one of my favorite parts of the evening: Denning proceeded to explain to the outsiders what we saw when Defoe danced, which was the story of a fish. When it begins to dance, it is shy, barely flapping a fin to the rhythm of the drums. As it finds its confidence, we see it use its strength to hover against the current, suspended over the river rocks, and begin to swim with vigor. Perhaps that is what makes the fish in the story an important companion for young Nawbin—small and shy, asking why, looking for the confidence, support and strength they need to join in the dance.

Of course, as with all live theater, this performance would not be possible without a team of artists—Native, Indigenous and allied—whose contributions work in concert. The set design by Katherine Freer, burnished to a soft glow by lighting designer Emma Deane (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara Nation), carved out an artful performance space within a communal one. Freer’s multimedia design, which served as the production’s animated backdrop, brought Katrina Brown’s illustrations to life—allowing us to wander through the forest, lie beneath the stars and crash downriver with Nawbin while we listened to the score by Olivia Shortt (Anishinaabe/Nipissing First Nation). Costume designer Lux Haac expanded the circle of collaborators by costuming Defoe in clothing by Native companies Teton Trade Cloth, Urban Native Era and Ginew. The prints in the costume reference Woodland Nations floral designs that ground the story in a particular region and, in Haac’s words, “show a contemporary depiction of the current presence of the Anishinaabe people.” The dark-wash jeans and denim jacket, by Ginew, kept Defoe visually connected to the water while creating shadowy hiding places for puppets. For this phase of development, the team was joined by stage manager Nikki Konomos and the festival’s artistic director and founder Blair Thomas, who served as puppet and movement consultant. The final flourish, linking cross-cultural communities, extended beyond the stage in an act of hospitality—as we were leaving the space, audience members were offered cups of soup to ease their own journeys homeward through the winter cold.

Future iterations of the performance will expand to include three more scenes—in addition to the fish, we will meet a second guide in the form of kingfisher and a third in the form of a turtle, who is an environmental activist. After having met the trio of guides, we will witness Nawbin’s journey homeward, filled with new purpose. To find out more and follow the production’s fundraising activities and ongoing life, visit: www.skeletoncanoe.com.