Like Indians throughout the American West, the Goshutes of Utah's west desert suffered at the hands of white settlers who encroached upon their land, stole their water and forced them onto reservations.
But recent years brought a shift in this imbalance of power. A small band of Goshutes accepted a private offer in 1997 to store high-level nuclear waste on their Skull Valley land 45 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, alarming Utah's white majority and sending officials scrambling to try to stop it.
When playwright Julie Jensen learned about this nuclear-waste controversy, she was immediately struck by its dramatic potential.
"I always wanted to write something about Indians because I know a lot about them. But [until the Skull Valley Goshutes] I never knew how to do it," says the native Utahn. "Suddenly, I had a plot. If you can write a story about how the thing you slap turns around to bite you in the butt, that's an interesting story."
That story has become Jensen's new drama, "Dust Eaters," which opens in previews Tuesday at the Salt Lake Acting Company. This production marks the world premiere of the play, which was workshopped in 2002-03 at SLAC, where Jensen is the resident playwright.
"Dust Eaters" covers 140 years of the struggle between the Goshute Indians and the white pioneers who settled in Utah in the mid-to-late 1800s. It traces the paths of two families, one Indian and the other Mormon, whose destinies are intertwined through decades of political and social change. The line separating the two families becomes blurred when a Mormon patriarch takes a young Goshute woman as one of his plural wives.
The Mormon half of this episodic story is one with which Jensen, who grew up Mormon in Beaver, is long familiar. The Goshute half was more of a mystery to her. Still, she believes two aspects of her past helped prepare her to write the play.
First, her father was an amateur archaeologist who led her on weekend trips into the desert to search for arrowheads, petroglyphs or other remnants of long-lost cultures. These trips sparked Jensen's young imagination and gave her a lifelong curiosity about Utah's native peoples.
Second, her father taught in the 1930s at a one-room schoolhouse on the other Goshute reservation in the shadow of the Deep Creek Range. He believed the Goshutes' only hope as a people was to assimilate into white society -- an attitude, typical of many white settlers at the time, that helped Jensen understand the perspective of her play's Mormon characters.
"Dust Eaters" is a series of seven scenes, each set roughly 20 years after the preceding one. The first scene takes place in 1877, the year Brigham Young died; the last in the late 1990s, after the nuclear-waste flap has erupted. Jensen says she based the seven-scene structure on an American Indian belief that every time a tribal leader takes action, he must consider its effects on seven future generations.
In this way, "Dust Eaters" seeks to illuminate the past not with a broad historical canvas but through intimate glimpses into everyday human lives.
"It personalizes history," says director David Mong, who praises Jensen's ability to pack emotional subtexts into all seven scenes. "Every scene is informed not only by the scene before it, but by the time that's lapsed in between."
In staging the play, SLAC believed it was crucial to cast American Indian actors in the Goshute roles. But three casting calls in Salt Lake City last year produced only two hopefuls, neither with any acting experience. So Mong and Jensen went to Los Angeles, where they found LaVonne Rae Andrews and Ernest David Tsosie III.
Andrews is a member of the Alaska-based Tlingit tribe and an Equity actor who has appeared in more than a hundred plays and musicals. Tsosie is a Navajo/Diné from Window Rock, Ariz., and a popular actor-comedian whose credits include a featured role in Tony Hillerman's "A Thief of Time" for PBS.
The two knew nothing about the Goshute tribe before signing on. To research their roles, they scoured the Internet, met with Goshutes at Salt Lake City's Indian Walk-In Center and drove out to Skull Valley, where they were struck by the desolate landscape and the scant size of the community (the Skull Valley band has only 120 members). Andrews even learned some Goshute words for her role.
"We wanted to be accurate as far as the language and the history," Tsosie says. "We didn't want to just spit out some jibberish."
Andrews plays Albertine and Maud Moon, two strong-willed Goshute women with rebellious spirits. Tsosie plays Maud Moon's brother Bone, a half-white alcoholic Goshute damaged by his service in the Korean War. As a former alcoholic himself, Tsosie feels a strong connection to the character.
"I look at him like I'm looking in the mirror," he says. "In a way, I was Bone. I couldn't do this role if I hadn't gone on the journey myself."
The pair join Utah theater veterans Joyce Cohen and Morgan Lund, who play a handful of Mormon settlers. In all, the four actors portray nine characters. Some characters appear in multiple scenes, evolving from children to wizened elders; others are descendants of characters from previous scenes.
"Each scene could be a play in itself," says Andrews, who likens "Dust Eaters" to a journey through a family's history. "There's not a boring second in it. If it was a book, it would be a page-turner."
It's also a microcosm, of sorts, of the settlement of the West and its central human tragedy: white settlers' relentless exploitation of native peoples. Although her sympathies are with the Goshutes, Jensen sought to be balanced in her script.
"I tried to make the arguments that the whites made -- that you simply have to 'civilize' these people, or whatever the word would be," says the playwright, who read every book she could find about the Goshute tribe. "These two cultures are very, very far apart. It's little wonder that they've never really understood each other."
Jensen, who is no longer an active member of the LDS Church, does not want "Dust Eaters" to be preachy. Nor does she wish to offer a simplistic view of Mormons or the Goshute people; her native characters, for example, reflect the real-life divisions within the tribe over the nuclear-waste storage issue. (The Goshute leadership remains locked in a legal battle with the state over the proposed $3.1 billion storage facility.) But she hopes her play will make audiences more tolerant of those people whose cultures differ from their own.
As a white playwright, Jensen wrestled with whether she was qualified to write about American Indians. Ultimately, she decided the story belonged to more than one group of people.
"The answer to the question of who should tell this story is that we all should," she says. "If we don't write about our history, what chance do we have to rectify it, face it, understand it? It's my story, too. It's all of our stories."
griggs@sltrib.com
Divisions in the west desert
* Salt Lake Acting Company presents the world premiere of "Dust Eaters," by SLAC resident playwright Julie Jensen. The play opens in previews Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m. before its formal opening Friday at 8 p.m. at the theater, 168 W. 500 North in Salt Lake City. It will then run Wednesdays through Sundays through May 1. The play contains adult language
and themes.
* Showtimes are Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $23 for previews; $27.50 to $33.50 for regular performances. Student tickets are available for $13 with valid ID. SLAC also offers discounted $18 tickets to patrons 30 and under. Call the SLAC box office at 801-363-SLAC or ArtTix at 801-355-ARTS, or visit SLAC online at http://www.saltlake actingcompany.org.
