The New Adventures of Super Indian is a new audio series, created by Native Voices, the resident theatre company at The Autry in Los Angeles. It is the only Equity theatre company devoted exclusively to developing and producing new works for the stage by Native American, Alaska Native, and First Nations playwrights.

The three one-hour episodes chronicle the rise of Super Indian and the residents of the fictional Leaning Oak Tribe Reservation. Hubert Logan, an ordinary reservation boy turned superhero faces off against three of his biggest foes – Wampum Baggs, the ringleader of the Circle of Evil; Blud Kwan’Tum, a cursed vampire determined to become a full-blooded Indian by any means necessary; and Karlie Keane, a scheming social media diva.

Paul Simpson chatted over Zoom with Super Indian’s creator and writer, Arigon Starr, and The Autry’s DeLanna Studi.

 

How did Super Indian come about in the first place?

Arigon: Well, it was a circuitous route. Super Indian actually started as an audio theatre series, a radio show. and it went to comics and now it’s back to audio theatre, shock of all shocks.

How much has it changed along the way? Is what we’re hearing now very similar to what was there originally or have the characters remoulded themselves as they’ve moved through the media?

Arigon: They’re pretty much the same as they were, I was always going for a lot of humour in this show and I wanted to highlight contemporary Native Americans and not always ‘Oh the storied past when we lived in teepees and wore fringe buckskin’ (laughs). I mean that stuff has been done to death and usually not done very well so I’m taking it to where we live now and how we live now and basing it on a fictitious tribe.

I wanted to do that because I’m Kickapoo from Oklahoma but my mother is Cherokee, she’s also Muscogee Creek and Seneca and I thought, “Well, I can’t have him be all of those tribes, can I?” So I made up one, the Cherokees won’t feel left out or the Seminoles wouldn’t feel left out, Lakota wouldn’t feel left out. No, he’s Leaning Oak, a fictional tribe but with a community much like we all live in today.

I know Delanna will say the same thing: these are the people we know, these are our aunties and uncles and our friends. Super Indian, aside from eating rezium-tainted cheese is just like everybody else here.

DeLanna: I’ve always been a fan of Super Indian and when it was brought to The Autry back in 2007 I had the luxury of playing a part in it so it’s been a favourite of mine.

One of the reasons it sticks out for me is it’s the first time that I’ve seen a Native American superhero. I know there have been some but there’s nothing I could find when I was a child, and especially not anything I could find that I could relate to, so I’m very excited that we have this relatable superhero who’s just like us, who comes from communities just like us.

Also, I love the fact that the women in this series are strong and beautiful. Usually when you think of Native women, in a way the media casts us, we’re always relegated to the background and we’re always victims and I love that this is not a victimisation play. The audio play actually lifts up the strong resilient Native people and it also lifts up our humour so I’m very happy to be onboard with this.

What would you say characterises the Native way of behaving, of reacting to people, of being in circumstances, that is different from, let’s say, a Greek community or an Italian community? Everybody has certain little quirks that are there but there are also things that are almost more deep seated in their nature.

Arigon: That’s a good question, and multi-layered too because I would imagine that Native people would probably get along great with Greeks or Jewish people or any of these other communities. There’s a lot of similarities because of our families and family structure, traditions and the things that we try to keep going through hardship, through whatever happens to us. We keep these things alive like our language, our ceremonies, all the things that we do that make us who we are.

Translating this to say 500 nations that’s a little hard, but there are certain commonalities that Native people have, such as the Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, things that we have to deal with on a daily basis.

And being sovereign nations, that’s a whole other business: being in the United States but still having our own laws and travel courts; governments and our government to government relations and that’s unusual. I wouldn’t say that that Greek community would have that going for them in the US or anywhere else, so it’s unique but also similar.

I think that the only time I’ve seen it done in any sort of visual medium in recent times was the series Stumptown. A lot of that was set on the reservation and one of the key plot points was the relationship between the characters who were going between the two. It did give that a very different feel at times and you’d think ‘We know where this plot is going’ but you didn’t, because there was a legal matter or something like that that was different between the two.

Arigon: Absolutely and we don’t really get that deep into politics or those sorts of situations. We touch on them in Super Indian because I’m keeping this light on purpose – because again, this is something that you don’t see from us. You don’t see us laughing and having a joke on each other or the outside world and I wanted to really key into that humour because that, I think, is one of the secrets of our resilience, it truly is.

DeLanna: Absolutely.

Arigon: Don’t tell anybody! (laughs)

Which begs the question: who are you aiming this at? Are you creating it for Native audiences because obviously there’s a lot in there that I had to work out from context what it means…

Arigon: (Laughs) It truly blows my mind that there were people in America who did not know what commodity cheese was. It’s part of any kind of hunger program or food instability – you’re going to find commodity cheese. It’s this horrible food product, it’s not really cheese.

Nevertheless this show was written for Natives first and if anybody else wants to come along for the ride come on, welcome!

DeLanna: I think that’s what makes it special, I discovered whenever you become specific the story becomes universal. People can see themselves in the characters, they can relate to the family dynamic. They know these people and they don’t have to be Native in order to enjoy it which is what I love about it.

I also love the fact that it’s what I call being unapologetically Native. A lot of [Native] writers when they write something they feel they have to also teach you. What Arigon has done is she’s created the context surrounding certain key elements and points and words, and she doesn’t have to hold your hand and walk you through it. You’re immediately part of that community and figuring things out as we go.

I think the bits where the kids are basically kicking each other’s ass, and the bullying and everything like that… that’s very universal.

Arigon: Indeed it is.

And the idea of taking something that’s precious to you as a gift that is completely and utterly ignored or looked down upon, I thought that was very nicely done. That was one element that really was more universal that perhaps any of us would like to admit.

Arigon: Ain’t that the truth, gosh. (laughs)

Are the three current scripts rewrites of the originals or have you gone back and started again?

Arigon: Well, yes and no. OK, the origin story was actually the first episode of the radio series that was produced back in 2006 at the National Audio Theatre Festival in West Plains Missouri, of all places. There was a gathering of about 20 some odd Native American people that wanted to learn how to do audio theatre but also radio professionals that came from tribal stations here. They need programming and we have a wealth of stories to tell so this kind of made sense that we did this.

So the first Super Indian episode was ten minutes and it did include the thread about the tainted commodity cheese. That show was live actors, live sound effects, live music, broadcast live over National Public Radio, which was excellent.

That led to The Autry with the previous Artistic Director and Executive Director asking to have ten episodes of Super Indian that again were brought to the stage with live actors and live music, live sound effects in Los Angeles. It was recorded in front of a live audience and then edited down to an hour programme that was distributed across the country through Native Voice One which is a Native radio broadcast syndicator.

That series went on in 2007. I had leftover scripts that didn’t get produced so I took those scripts and because I’m an artist, in addition to a writer, actor, musician, I turned them into comics because I had a lifelong goal that I wanted to do a Native American superhero and comic.

I put all that stuff together and had enough material by 2011. That’s how long it took to get that much material together and learn how to tell a comic story because that’s a whole different ball of wax than audio theatre. This is panel to panel, storyboards… it’s like directing a movie, practically, on the page.

And then, those webcomics turned into volume 1 that came out in 2012 and then volume 2 came out in 2014 and those scripts and stories were the basis for this new series.

DeLanna: So, when we commissioned Arigon it was one of those situations where I’ve always been a fan and I always jokingly say I stalk her on a daily basis.

I began courting her back in August. I would just send out a few emails, a phone call like ‘Hi Arigon, how’s it going? How’s Super Indian? Do you have volume 3 yet?’ Also, because we had to make that pivot to the virtual world I was like ‘What would be accessible? What will people want?’ coming through February and March.

I knew I was Zoomed out. I was in so many Zoom meetings, the thought of having to do another Zoom performance was too much. I loved the idea of the audio plays because once again, you can be anywhere. You can be cooking dinner, you don’t have to be actively engaged, you can still listen and enjoy it. So I take my dog out for walks and listen to it and it just makes me so happy.

The fact that we were able to make it into an audio show and we were able to make it into a longer version, I was able to go to Arigon and say, ‘We can finally flesh out these characters and get to know them better. I want you to really dive deep into the Leaning Oak Reservation and tell us more about these people.’ Now we know them as real human beings and I love that, every time I listen to it I learn something new about the community and that makes me very happy. You’re going to hear me say that multiple times because this is my inner twelve year old coming out!

COVID made it easy for us to do this and honestly we would not be physically able to do this at Native Voices at The Autry. Our stage isn’t that big, there’s no way we could hold sixteen actors.

Those sixteen actors played 95 parts – which is an actor’s dream come true, if you ask me – and they were in four different time zones. We were able to use actors that we’ve always wanted to work with but because of geography and logistics we couldn’t afford to fly them into Los Angeles. So now we had access to some of the best actors in the industry and we were able to get them “on stage” and to be able to tell this beautiful, fun story. It was a dream come true.

Did you actually record them with as many people up on Zoom as possible or were people recording their own lines separately?

DeLanna: It was a combination of both. Every actor did build their own little inhouse studio, so there were a lot of sofa cushions and quilts! And we did do it via Zoom, that way they could see the actor they were reacting to, which is always best. These are actors who are used to playing off of each other, not necessarily audio actors, who are OK to go into a room and just respond. They were able to have that moment.

We did do pickups, where we did ask people to just be individually there, but we started off with the basics of, “We’re recording our Zoom calls, we all look silly, we all have blankets on our heads – we’re all in this together.”

You get that ensemble feel…

Arigon: Oh gosh, yes. What was really wonderful about the whole thing was working with Mr Tom Maggs and his dad, Mr Dirk Maggs who I’ve worked with before.

Again working with Native Voices at The Autry I did a one person show back in 2006 called The Red Road. I played eleven different characters and just did this whole 90 minute extravaganza. We took that and with Dirk’s help, broke that down into an audio theatre piece. That was really the first time we got to work together but we’d known each other before that, so I was just itching to work with that guy.

I have always had a love for audio theatre for radio theatre, for anything that gave you the aural experience so you create the visuals. I thought ‘Oh my gosh, [Dirk] gets this’. I’d been following all the stuff that he had done with Spider-Man and Superman and his Hitchhiker’s Guide and I was like ‘That’s the guy for me, I’ve got to find something to do with him.’

So finally, we did Red Road and when DeLanna called, I was like ‘Can we have Dirk?’ then “cry cry cry” because we probably couldn’t afford him. As it turned out Dirk was working with Neil Gaiman on Sandman so he said, ‘I can’t do it but my son can’, and I thought, “Well, the son doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Tom was awesome.

DeLanna: He was a godsend, he was incredible.

Was Tom doing that on Zoom from over here in the UK or did he come over to you for part of it?

Arigon: No, he was in England, he did all of this transatlantic. It was crazy. He wasn’t on the recording sessions with us: everybody recorded their bits on Audacity then all of the files were sent to a Dropbox and Tom assembled everything.

It’s always a thrill to do anything with Dirk and then Tom was an extra added fantastic bonus that came along with that friendship, and with this working relationship. After it was all said and done, he helped me edit and make the show better, he really did. I was a co-director along with Olivia Espinoza and we did our best, making sure the actors got the stuff right or at least to where I thought it was right and then it truly got better once Tom got his hands on it.

What, for each of you, was the biggest challenge involved?

DeLanna: Well, for The Autry, I’ll just venture out there and say we produce plays, that’s what we do. We develop and produce new plays written by indigenous artists; this is our first time to actually do a series of audio plays. We had to learn everything, we had no idea what we were doing.

Post production? We don’t have that in play development. Post production in a play is when you strike the set and get rid of everything, that’s it. It’s just manual labour but in this case it was a whole other ballgame.

Thank God we had Tom and Dirk because they’re the ones who held our hand through this process and guided us and meant we were able to have such a quality project for our first time out, it’s just unbelievable.

I would say that was the big challenge for us, it was a lot of scheduling issues just because we had sixteen actors we were working with, in four different time zones and of course just the quick turnaround. We were able to record all three episodes in two weeks which in the theatre world is just unheard of.

For The Autry, it was a learning process for us.

Arigon: The biggest challenge was, I think, to expand my writing process to include the aural experience. It’s one thing to write visually but to write for your ears? That was a little hard. Again, I was so happy that Dirk went through my scripts for me. We didn’t have long conversations but we had very detailed emails and notes that went back and forth such as ‘This needs a little more fleshing out’. I had done radio theatre scripts before but nothing that went to this depth and nothing that was this time length before.

So it was a luxury: I got to flesh out some of the stuff that I had written as two issues within volume two, The Curse of Blud Kwan’Tum. I kind of followed my comic but there were places I needed to fill in between the ears. What are the sounds of a thousand bat wings flapping? That kind of stuff.

That sounds like a line from the old Adam West Batman series…

Arigon: Indeed it does! That’s where that show came from: Super Indian is a love letter to Batman and Adam West and all of that. I loved that programme when I was a child, that was my jam.

I was wondering because the two things Super Indian reminded me of were the original Superman radio show – the Bud Collyer narration, “faster than a speeding locomotive and all of that”, which had me grinning – and the same very heightened reality of Batman where the characters take it seriously themselves within it like Adam West and Burt Ward did. All the good villains on Batman were the ones who absolutely played it to the hilt but never actually realised themselves that there was a joke they were in on.

Arigon: (Laughs) That’s so true and that’s one thing that really helped me as a co-director working with all of the actors was telling them to not play the joke. “You might think it’s funny, it may sound funny to you but you are deadly serious and you’re in a reality and just be yourself.” That really helped a lot of the actors.

One thing that had me laughing was the takedown of the doctor who’s supposed to be the expert on Native culture…

Arigon: I love that scene because that is our reality sometimes, especially in academia where somebody comes in from outside of our community. ‘Let me tell you who you are.’

DeLanna: Yes, all the time.

Arigon: So, I had to, I couldn’t help myself.

How exaggerated was that?

Arigon: Not so much

DeLanna: I was going to say, not very. Sadly, not very.

Did you at any point feel concern about non-Native audiences not understanding elements, or was it very much “No, this is us, you take us on our terms, and if you don’t like it, walk away”?

Arigon: You said it. That’s how I approach this show and the comics too. Even when I first originally thought this show up I said, ‘I’m going to play it for laughs. Sometimes humour kind of hurts, but it’s anybody in the Native community will go “I’ve had it with XYZ. I’ve had it with those professors and I’ve had it with this.”’ How do you turn that anger into something that’s positive? I don’t want to say it’s teachable. It’s not really teachable but it’s, “I get you, I see what happens to you, that’s happened to me and let’s talk about it in a funny way.”

Both Lovecraft Country and the Amazon series Them which have been on in the last few months have been looking at parts of the Black experience that a lot of White people I think weren’t aware of, such as The Great Migration and things like that. Could Super Indian be a teachable thing for the Trail of Tears? Or is that something that’s too sensitive a subject to be dealt with in this way?

Arigon: That’s a really good question because both DeLanna’s and my families, that’s our history, that happened to us. So I truly don’t know if I’m there with the humour on that yet. I’m not there yet, maybe DeLanna is but I’m not.

DeLanna: I actually did write a play about me walking the Trail of Tears with my Dad and the humour that I found was mostly turned towards myself and not the actual Trail just because I wasn’t coping with it like a normal person would.

That’s unfair on yourself, you’re going back into something that would be like someone whose family died in the Holocaust going back to the site of a concentration camp. I think saying it’s not normal is almost reversing the experience.

DeLanna: Thank you Paul, that’s true.

I think that, and I’ll use the word properly, whitewashing of history, if it is allowed to happen, will mean the knowledge will disappear.

I am assuming there is still an oral tradition in the Native culture…

Arigon: Oh yes.

DeLanna: Oh absolutely.

…but which feels as if it’s dying out elsewhere. Is this a continuation in a different medium of that storytelling? Do you see it as that?

Arigon: Yes, definitely because there is a lot of things that I loaded into those episodes that are historical, that are true things, real things that have happened and the Native audience will know. If a non Native audience hears it and says ‘What is that about?’ maybe they’ll go look it up? I would hope that that would happen. I hope somebody deep dives into this stuff. I layered it up – c’mon and get it!

With something like then, is there a synergy with what The Autry’s doing? Is that where there can be stuff that you’re doing elsewhere that cross pollinates?

DeLanna: Oh absolutely. I was hired at The Autry back in February of last year, but I was only in the office for two weeks before we shut down because of COVID. I’ve been working remotely from my parents’ home in Cherokee Nation ever since then. I jokingly said when they hired me they didn’t know I was going to Indigenise the whole museum so I love the fact that we are able to tell these very diverse stories and also these histories from different perspectives.

I agree with you: there’s been so much whitewashing of America’s history and I feel that’s a disservice to, not just the people you’re whitewashing, but to all of America in general and to the rest of the world who’s getting their history about America from America. I feel this is a part of our shared history. It’s part of the tapestry that we’ve woven together and in order to know better we have to learn, and until you learn what has happened in the past you won’t be able to do better.

If we don’t learn from history then we’re doomed to repeat it. It’s a cliché but it’s true.

DeLanna: It’s true and I feel like there are so many things about the Native culture here that no one talks about. How do we make it safe to talk about those things? I think that’s what Arigon does, she leads us. This is an easy gateway into learning more about Native culture. It’s a fun gateway and I know she said she doesn’t think it’s educational but it does educate. I’ve learned with working with so many different audiences over the past 25 years of me doing this, that if you mix it with entertainment, the audience doesn’t know they’re learning something.

I have to say, the audience is learning something with Super Indian. In fact I had some Google-able moments with Super Indian especially with episode three, I actually had to do some more research about the Eiffel Tower! The whole set up about the Wild West Show, I was so intrigued by it but I find that there’s a lot for Natives to learn just by listening.

The New Adventures of Super Indian can be accessed here