The Museum as Stage in ʻAntíkoni’

Set as an Indigenous intervention in the model of ancient Greek dramas rendered into a staple of so-called Western civilization’s literary canon, Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni takes the very concept of “tragedy” and intersperses her narrative with humor and hope. The original 5th-century tragedy, Antigone by Sophocles, centers around the title character’s defiance of her uncle Creon who assumed rulership of Thebes following a civil war between Antigone’s late brothers. Despite Creon’s order not to bury one of her brothers, deemed rebellious amid the conflict, Antigone’s sense of justice supersedes the crown and leads to her eventual execution. This Indigenous adaptation, most recently directed by Madeline Sayet (Mohegan) and staged as a part of the Autry Museum’s Native Voices theater program, draws on the role of colonial institutions as well as the dramaturgical canon with its site-specificity. As Antíkoni’s drama centers on questions of repatriation and the ethics of museums handling human remains—that is, the ancestors of Native Americans—the site of the museum itself is both setting and an active player in the story that this Native-run production tells. 

Rather than in the Autry’s on-site theater, Native Voices situated this play at the Autry’s Southwest campus, that is, the historic Southwest Museum of the American Indian. Founded in 1907, L.A.’s Southwest Museum was the oldest museum in the city, with dated facilities in the care of its objects. Updating the facilities involved reckoning with the painful legacy of its collections, a reckoning that requires reparative work such as repatriation of its many human remains and funerary objects. The Southwest Museum’s grounds and objects came under the stewardship of The Autry Museum of The West in 2003 to better steward the Southwest Museum’s collections, both in terms of conservation and repatriation. The Autry relocated the collections over the course of a decade and finally shuttered the older museum in 2022. 

In re-activating the museum, this staging emphasizes the characters’ struggles to realize different paths to repatriation as a form of justice. The remnants of the former museum space, including display cases and former labels with new curation as set design, situates the audience as part of the action of the play. The setting is intimate and immersive—with about 60 audience members in the sold-out showing, encircling while also sitting as part of the production—while also imbued with the structures of colonial acquisition practices as part of the outer exhibition setting. Antíkoni is then an adaptation that places questions of Indigenous sovereignty amid living in a settler-colonial state and its institutions, as well as kinship responsibilities toward the dead. 

The play opens by establishing Antíkoni, played by Lingít actor Erin Xáalnook Tripp, and her law-student sister, Ismene (Isabella Madrigal; Cahuilla/Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), who we soon find out are nieces of not King, but Museum Director, Kreon (Frank Henry Katasse; Lingít). The establishing conflict involves the remains of two brothers—19th-century Cayuse and Crow affiliated warriors whose bodies became objects for auction in Paris—and the question of what their reunion in the basement of an Indigenous-led but state-owned museum might mean in terms of justice for Indigenous peoples past and present. Following the original Greek play’s roles, the sisters each present two differing approaches to justice. Antíkoni aims to break the law in order to ensure the brothers are properly buried back on their homelands—what is commonly called rematriation—rather than kept captive in the museum’s basement. Ultimately, the sisters question whether it is better to achieve their goal of the return or liberation of ancestors working through or outside of institutions and their laws. While Ismene struggles with defining her role in maintaining the state’s law, and finding social justice through the legal justice system, Antíkoni demands swifter justice through direct action.

Kreon represents a third approach rooted in institutional stewardship, as custodian of the past within the (white, colonial) National Party’s state. He draws from the example of Ishi, who in both life and death was a captive of anthropology and its museums. In the early 20th century, the Hearst Museum of Anthropology kept Ishi as a specimen for the sake of studying the Yahi language, and after death housed in the museum collection. And yet, as Kreon argues, through that captivity, language was preserved. Piatote, who teaches English at University of California, Berkeley, cited the Kennewick man as one source of inspiration, but the play’s reference to Ishi also underscores the sordid history of her own campus’s complicity: It was Berkeley’s Alfred Kroeber and his colleagues who made the same argument as Kreon to keep Ishi confined to the museum. 

Piatote’s version of the Greek myth is a deeply feminist play, like other adaptations, but one that reflects on women’s centricity to Native life specifically. Women’s relational roles and responsibilities in many Native communities have sustained their significance despite colonial impositions of cis-heteropatriarchy. In this way, Native “feminism” exists separately from European/American equal-rights movements, since it instead involves a perpetuation or reclamation of Indigenous kinship. As Sophocles’ play involved a chorus, or group that acted to serve as a community for commentary throughout the play, Piatote’s chorus is a trio of Native Aunties. The Aunties (Arigon Starr, Gigi Buddie, and Dawn Lura), who take their seats among the audience members while chatting and laughing, but also knitting, as part of their acting in the show. Beadwork also features prominently: The set design centers Anishinaabe embroidery motifs and in the opening scene, while Ismene studies, Antíkoni beads. These details emphasize the overall messages of the play, where speeches consider not just the return of ancestors and a historical narrative struggle, but how history mutes the many violences that Indigenous women face from the colonial state. 

Yet throughout the play, these women find joy, a sort of resistance. A combination of escalating threats to Native sovereignty, from cuts to tribal colleges and universities to increasing encroachments on Native governance and resource management, make the need for Indigenous feminist leadership more important than ever. While Native women leaders in the government, such as Deb Haaland and Shelly Lowe, no longer serve federal office, Antíkoni can remind us that there are still other routes for Indigenous feminist persistence. We can see these efforts in not only rematriation, but through mutual aid, educational outreach, reproductive justice, environmental justice, and other organized collective actions. At the same time, the play reminds us of the most essential resistance of all: living and thriving in community, as embodied by the Aunties. Antíkoni, both as a play and titular character, responds that justice toward the ancestors, toward the past and the dead, involves seeking to serve the living and future generations by unburying wrongs.