Personal, Political, Powerful: DeLanna Studi's AND SO WE WALKED, at Portland Center Stage
When DeLanna Studi was in elementary school, she told her class in Oklahoma that she was an Indian, and her teacher replied that Indians were extinct. About 2,000 miles away but around the same time, I was sitting in a similar classroom learning about Manifest Destiny, the idea that God wanted white people to expand their dominion and spread capitalism and democracy across North America.
This is what stayed in my mind as I watched AND SO WE WALKED, Studi's one-woman show now playing at Portland Center Stage, and it has stuck around since -- the fact that the elementary school history curriculum in the 1980s taught me how special my people are and taught Studi that her people no longer exist.
