Over a recent coffee shop breakfast, we chatted with poet, playwright, actor, activist and Pasadena resident Carolyn Dunn, MFA, PhD, who will soon appear in the world premiere of “Four Women in Red” at Burbank’s Victory Theatre Center on January 17.
“Four Women in Red,” the story of four generations of indigenous women searching for missing or murdered sisters, daughters, granddaughters, wives, nieces cousins, aunts, grandmothers and mothers was first developed by Native Voices of the Autry Museum of the American West, the only Actors’ Equity theater company in the country dedicated to developing and producing new plays by Native artists.
The play’s upcoming debut marks the first time that a play developed by Native Voices has been produced by another Los Angeles theater. The play is the recipient of a prestigious Los Angeles New Play Project (LANPP) grant and is supported in part by a Burbank Community Arts Grant.
Dunn is an Associate Professor teaching history, literature and film at California State University, Long Beach, and was a James Irvine Foundation Fellow at the Center for American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her published titles include “Through the Eye of the Deer,” “The Frybread Queen,” “Ghost Dance,” “Soledad,” “Three Sisters,” “Outfoxing Coyote,” “Salmon Creek Road Kill,” “Echolocation: Poems and Stories from Indian Country,” “Coyote Speaks: Wonders of the Native American World,” and “The Stains of Burden and Dumb Luck.”
Onstage, Dunn has appeared in productions of “Desert Stories for Lost Girls,” “The Bingo Palace” by Louise Erdrich, “Sliver of a Full Moon,” and the musicals “Distant Thunder” and “Missing Peace.” She’s also part of The Mankillers, an all-women, all-First Nations drum group.
Dunn’s complex indigenous roots (Cherokee, Muscogee, Tunica / Choctaw-Biloxi, Atapakas-Ishak, Cajun, Seminole Freedman-Acadian Creole) align with those of the entire creative team associated with the production. She traces her origins to Oklahoma, Mississippi and Louisiana, and today divides her time between Pasadena and her family home outside Oklahoma City.
And she’s seeing red. The ability of spirits to recognize the color informs much of the narrative of “Four Women in Red.”
Dunn explains “Red is the word that white people use to describe Native Americans, meaning our skin color. But the red hand that’s used as a symbol to draw attention to #MMIWG, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, has to do with spiritual beliefs. In the play, the dead can see the color red.”
The iconic red hand print placed over a woman’s mouth is also widely understood to symbolize the silence of the Canadian and U.S. governments, media and law enforcement regarding the crisis.
The latest obstacle: in 2019, the House of Representatives, led by the Democratic Party, passed HR 1585 (Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2019) by a vote of 263-158, which would have increased tribes’ prosecution rights. The bill was defeated by the Republican Senate majority.
“Modern Native Americans aren’t what or who most white people think we are,” she says as we admire her massive silver spider ring, elaborate ink furling and scrolling over her bare arms, and candy cane-enameled holiday manicure. “About 22 percent of indigenous folks live on the res these days. Most Native people live in cities now, starting when the Indian Relocation Act dissolved federal recognition of most tribes in 1956.”
The Indian Relocation Act didn’t force people to leave their reservations, but did end federal funding for reservation schools, hospitals and basic services, along with the jobs they created. The result is that many First Nations people find themselves displaced into a sort of gray zone, a purgatorial parallel universe between mainstream American society and fragmented, fractured tribal communities. They typically find few resources and little unbiased recourse against social injustice.
“People on the outside have absolutely no idea what is going on,” says Dunn.
Pop culture proof: TikTok searches established “demure” as 2024 word of the year for Dictionary.com, while Collins English dictionary cited “brat.” After worldwide public discussion and more than 37,000 votes, Oxford named “brain-rot” as the WOTY, while Cambridge selected “manifest,” and Merriam-Webster gave the honors to “polarization.”
On nobody’s WOTY list: “femicide.”
The fact that this word isn’t on the tip of most tongues is the key to the enormity of the crisis itself. Femicide doesn’t generally refer to woman and girls killed in war. In some contexts, the term references a woman killed by an intimate partner or someone in her own family – the United Nations cites that this occurs every 10 minutes, globally.
Another kind of femicide targets women simply because they are women. This stark reality is inflected by social variables in every setting. Global champion for gender equality, UN Women, points out that femicides are the ultimate evidence that the systems and structures meant to protect women and girls are failing.
Dunn cites “man-camps” as a deadly component in the femicide crisis among Native women in the USA. These man-camps are the housing areas provided by oil extraction companies to workers along the Minnesota and Michigan borders with Canada, where large concentrations of First Nations people also reside. Generational poverty, addiction and homelessness magnify the risk to these vulnerable populations.
Within these populations, young women, especially those who are distanced from immediate family, are often kidnapped and trafficked as cartel drug mules. And sometimes, they’re simply raped, tortured, killed, mutilated and dumped.
“The north-south trucking corridors are especially dangerous,” says Dunn. “You better remember to always bring your phone and your bear-spray. Men know they can get away with it, because there is so little protection.”
This experience parallels another epicenter of femicide further south in Ciudad Juárez, where rows of candy-pink wooden crosses replace the red hand print.
The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 established maquiladoras, border-town factories in search of cheap labor. Many parts of Juárez lack electricity and paved roads. Workers leave their rural villages to live in shantytowns without basic utilities.
Women often return alone from factory night shifts long after dark, or walk through undeveloped areas before dawn to board company-provided buses to report to work. When a woman doesn’t show up for her shift, there often is no next of kin to notify.
Law enforcement agencies often appear apathetic, or simply powerless to respond. This deadly cocktail of isolation and lack of infrastructure contribute to the reported jump of up to 600 percent of femicides since the inception of NAFTA.
Activists along the Canadian border report similar challenges.
“These tragedies are related,” says Dunn. “The official response to the increasing violence against women is inconsistent and ineffective at every level. It’s gender violence, and it’s epidemic race violence. Vulnerable red and brown women are disappearing. Because the cartels, and men in general, know that you can kill a woman, especially a minority woman, with impunity.”
And there’s nothing “demure” or “brat” about it.
DEETS
- “Four Women in Red”
- Written by Laura Shamas, directed by Jeanette Harrison
- Affordable previews January 10,11,12, Opening night January 17, Runs through February 23
- Fridays and Saturdays, 8:00 PM, Sundays, 4:00 PM
- The Victory Theatre Center, 3326 West Victory Boulevard, Burbank, CA 91505
- Tickets: 818-841-5421
- thevictorytheatrecenter.org
