Timothy White Eagle’s Radical Rituals Connect Art, History, and Culture

In early November, On the Boards unveiled a briefly-run but awe-inspiring performance: Indian School by ritualist Timothy White Eagle (he/him) and co-created with Hatlo (they/them). White Eagle is quick to confirm that Indian School was a collaborative effort, not a solo show.

Timothy White Eagle (TWE): “We have a really great sound engineer, Crystal Cortez (a sound engineer slash acoustic composer) who uses field recordings to make these incredible soundscape environments. So there's a layer of this incredible, consciously composed soundscape. And then we have Olivia (Komahcheet) doing instrumentation and vocals. So she has written basically like a movie score for our show and sings live and plays live on top of that intense acoustic thing. And then we have DB Amorin, who is doing video, there's video projections everywhere.”

Indian School was intended as a healing, communal space, beginning with White Eagle’s own experiences of estrangement from culture by way of adoption, the historical relationship of his ancestors to the Colorado River, and his grandfather, as an Indigenous person whose culture was stolen and suppressed via United States’ Indian Boarding Schools.

Timothy White Eagle at On the Boards / The Evergreen Echo

TWE: “I think the root of everything I do comes from this idea that I was taught a long time ago, which is, you heal yourself so you can help heal your community. The healed community will help heal the world, but the root you have to keep going back to is, how can you heal yourself? So most of my projects have a root in a discord within myself—this one certainly.

So that's always where I start, is trying to find my center, my grounding, and trying to better understand how I can step into a place of highest power. And as I do that publicly, it's a powerful thing to watch somebody go through a healing experience, and I do it with an open heart for the audience to participate in and so they come along on that experience. And so, it is vicariously evolutionary.

It's [Indian School] really three stories. It's my story, my grandfather's story, and the story of the Colorado River. And I'm descended from Mojave. People in Mojave are traditionally called the people of the river, and they have this really intimate, intense relationship with the Colorado, and then my grandfather specifically…some of his personal stories related to the river quite intensely. And so those three stories are what get examined through the piece.

My grandfather was forced to go to Indian School in 1915 and his experience was bad, but it wasn't the worst. So what I can say is this isn't the worst experience that people have gone through at Indian School. It's just my experience. It's the story I feel like I can honestly tell, and so that's the story I'm telling of it. And certainly there are other more brutal stories or facets to the Indian School chapter.”

White Eagle has been open about his own history of growing up as a mixed-race Indigenous child, adopted into a white, Mormon family. When asked to point to a specific instance that has stayed with him from that experience, White Eagle recollects his 2015 ritual The White Room:

“Back in the day, Spencer W. Kimball, who was the active Prophet when I was a kid, had written a book called The Miracle of Forgiveness. And in that book, he writes about Native American people. And Native Americans in the Mormon belief system have the color of their skin as a curse. That there was a group of righteous people and a group of heathens, and the heathens overpower the righteous people and slaughter them all. And so God curses all of those people with dark skin. And so all of the people in North and South America who have dark skin, and all the Indigenous populations are all descendants from Laman, so they're called Lamanites, and the color of their skin is a curse.

That was very, very present in my childhood, was that the color of my skin is a curse. In the book, he said, ‘I have been amongst the Lamanite people, and I have seen that through their good works, their skin has started to lighten, and I predict today when righteous, God-loving Lamanites, will be white and lightsome.’ And so I grew up with that idea that if I were a good Mormon boy, I could be purified at that level, that I could be white.

The Mormons have since taken that passage out of the book. The book's still in publication, but they've removed that particular passage. But somewhere, I have an old copy of it that has the original in it. That comes up just a little bit here in this performance [Indian School], and it also is the root of the White Room Installation.

White Room ritual moment / Timothy White Eagle

That space was, was my reclaiming of myself as a sacred person, and it was based on the idea, which the true idea is that the very center of a Mormon Temple is an all-white room called the Celestial Room, and it's the top floor in the center of the building is the Celestial Room. They say it's the most holy place on Earth. It's as close to heaven as you can get and be on the physical Earth.

I wanted to reclaim that idea, because I couldn’t go to Bellevue and walk into that room because I'm a heathen, right? I wanted to reclaim the idea of myself as a sacred being. And so I created my own White Room and invited all my friends to come and do whatever they wanted.”

White Eagle’s foray into ritualism was a labyrinthine journey. It began with a group called the Radical Faeries, a gay-centered group that is described by Guardian writers Rory Carroll and Amanda Holpuch in 2015 as “...a group which blends counter-cultural values, queer consciousness, and spirituality”. White Eagle’s attunement to ritualism grew when he met Clyde Hall, a Shoshone-Métis Two-Spirit elder, writer, and authority on Native American culture, arts, and folkways.

TWE: “I started making ritual, actually, before I met Clyde. I was active with the Radical Faeries down in North Creek, Oregon, and really quickly, I was drawn to being one of the facilitators, vocalizers, and rituals there, specifically pagan rituals for Beltane and Samhain. I started going there twice a year, and I'd always be one of the central people in establishing the ritual.

One of the nice things about that environment, that collective, is that it does have a certain amount of folks around who know tradition, in pagan tradition and other Earth-based traditional spiritualities, but it also has this element of chaos and of creativity. The rituals would have these aspects of tradition, and then totally new things would happen every year.

Prior to that, I had been on Capitol Hill doing improvisational performance art. I used to own a coffee shop called the Coffee Messiah, and we had the Cabaret of Despair every Saturday night, and my pieces were almost always improvisational. So I went from that environment of improvising into a creative space that was about creating a ritual that was partially improvised. And then I meet Clyde, and I go into his very structured environment, which is based in a traditional ceremonial perspective, but is his unique vision.

And so he has created a new ceremony that, many of its aspects are drawn from different cultural traditions, but overall, the ceremony, what it is, what it manifests in the world, is unique and new. So it was a really perfect fit for me when we started working together. I got exposed to his ceremony, and then also, especially in the early years, I was traveling with him a lot, and we would go to different ceremonies in the Plateau area, inner Mountain West. I would see really, really traditional ceremonies, the kind of ceremonies that hadn't changed in 200 years. And then I would see other ceremonies, like his ceremony, where he was allowing his personal visions to influence the ceremony.

So I was literally with him one time, and he had a vision, and I got to see how that manifested into the workings of the ceremony and came forward. I got to see him over and over again, adjusting the ceremony based on his personal vision.

Ann Hamilton's "accountings"

Richard Nicol

Around the time I started working with Radical Faeries, was the time I was doing all that work at Coffee Messiah. And I was really impacted by installation art here in Seattle, if you remember the old OK Hotel and the installations upstairs, and Ann Hamilton show [accountings, 1992] at the Henry. They had actually taken over this entire space. And there were free flying birds, and there was a tactile thing on the floor. I remember being in that space and thinking, I want to perform here. And that launched this idea of creating installed space and then performing or being a host in it, of supporting the space energetically.

Because I love that. I love Ann Hamilton, and I love her work, but I remember being in that space feeling like there needs to be a host. I want there to be like an aliveness in this room, because it's so alive in every other way.

So that's my background. And then I go off with Clyde. Then, in 2015 I did The White Room, which is an installed space that I was performing in. Around that time, I met Taylor Mac, and I started touring with him and working on his shows. And that sort of took me into a place of performing my own shows. I definitely had this benefit of being exposed to traditional ritual, ones that were really, really held tightly and not changed for centuries. And I also was exposed to these Radical Faerie—contemporary, improvisational, highly creative, highly improvisational spaces.

And then, the thing right in between the two, which is what Clyde does, to make something new using old stuff and his vision. And I take that same spirit into this work. I understand ritual space. I understand certain pieces of ritual technology. I understand, and so I bring those elements in and try to create a ritual that's appropriate for everyone that isn't using—I don't use any traditional songs.

I don't use anything that anybody would be worried about me appropriating, so everything that is spoken or sung is original to me or my collaborators, and the mechanisms that we're walking through are original. So I'm not taking an old ceremony and putting it on stage, but I am definitely influenced by what I learned by being in those spaces.”

[In Indian School] “...the seating is non-traditional, the video projection surface is non-traditional. And one clue I give people at the beginning is I'm completely fine if I look out and everybody's eyes are closed. And I encourage people to dive into the sonic experience whenever they feel like it, and to not feel like they have to keep their eyes open on me. It's immersive.

We go into some dark terrain, and we come out of it. I think that's what's important. And I hope that people will continue to do research and look at movies like Sugar House and the other movies that are coming out that examine the deeper parts of this story or the more intense parts but, but my story really focuses on the loss of culture, and that is the trauma: the loss of culture.”

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For more information on Timothy White Eagle’s next projects, keep an eye on his website.