E. Donald Two-Rivers

• Born: June 29, 1945
• Birthplace: Ontario, Canada
• Died: December 28, 2008
• Place of death: Green Bay, Wisconsin

Biography

E. Donald Two-Rivers was born Edmond (or Edmund) Donald Broeffle in Ontario, Canada, on June 29, 1945, to parents Nancy Johnson and Clarence Broeffle. His family was of Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) heritage, and Two-Rivers and his siblings grew up on the Seine River Reserve in northwestern Ontario. As a child, he developed an interest in storytelling thanks to his maternal grandmother, who entertained the children with stories that later inspired several of his dramatic works.

Two-Rivers moved to the United States at the age of sixteen and settled in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. As a young man, he became involved in illegal activities and eventually served a prison term for robbery. While in prison, Two-Rivers completed his high school education and took college courses through an extension program. He also began writing after being inspired by fellow inmate Paul Crump, who had become a published novelist while in prison. Following his release, he found work as a machinist.

Career

Two-Rivers initially became well known for his poetry, which he performed at poetry slams primarily in the Chicago area; he was a fixture at Chicago's Green Mill Cocktail Lounge, which hosted the well-known Uptown Poetry Slam. Some of Two-Rivers's early poetic work was collected in the chapbook A Dozen Cold Ones, which was released by the small publisher MARCH/Abrazo Press in 1992 and launched at the Green Mill that year. A short film based on his piece "I'm Not Tonto," featured in A Dozen Cold Ones, was produced in 1993 and later screened at various events, including the 1995 Dreamspeakers Festival of Aboriginal Arts in Edmonton, Canada. Two-Rivers remained active as a poet throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, performing at events such as the 2003 Chicago Poets against the War reading, held in protest of the Iraq War. His second poetry collection, Pow Wows, Fat Cats, and Other Indian Tales, was published by Mammoth Publications in 2003.

Having developed an interest in performing through his work as a poet, Two-Rivers began acting in plays in the Chicago area but soon grew frustrated by the limited roles available to him and by reviewers' responses to his characters, which he found to be often rooted in stereotypes of American Indians. He began to think about writing original plays that would offer more rewarding opportunities for indigenous actors, address topics of importance to him, and give the public a better understanding of the indigenous American populations. To that end, Two-Rivers studied playwriting at the Chicago Dramatists theater, an institution dedicated to assisting developing playwrights with their craft. During the mid-1990s, he founded the Red Path Theater Company, for which he served as artistic director through 2002. Dedicated to producing plays by and about American Indians, the company initially held readings in Two-Rivers's basement before moving to the American Indian Center of Chicago. The company's debut staged reading was held at Chicago's Beacon Street Gallery and Theater. Red Path later established an office at Harry S. Truman College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago.

Two-Rivers became a prolific playwright during the 1990s, composing numerous plays that were often based loosely on his own experiences, those of members of his community, or stories he learned as a child. His play Old Indian Trick, or An Old Urban Indian Story as Told by an Old Urban Indian Who May Have Lied premiered at Chicago's Beacon Street Theater in 1994 and was later performed at several other venues, including Truman College and the University of Illinois. Truman College hosted the premieres of several of his other works, including Forked Tongues (1995) and Shattered Dream (1996), while one-act plays such as Coyote Sits in Judgment (1998) and Winter Summit, or The Bang-Bang Incident (1999) debuted at the WINTER, Time of Telling events at Chicago's Newberry Library. His play Chili Corn was developed through the Studio Z Chicago Play Initiative and premiered at the Great Lakes Naval Station in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1997. These six plays were later collected in Briefcase Warriors: Stories for the Stage, published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2001 as part of the press's American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series.

Although best known for his poems and plays, Two-Rivers was also the author of both fiction and nonfiction prose. In the early 1990s, he wrote a column titled "Life in Albany Park" for a Chicago newspaper, in which he documented life in the titular neighborhood. He also wrote a variety of short stories, many of which were later published in his collection Survivor's Medicine (1998). His short fiction has also been featured in anthologies such as Pow Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience; Short Fiction from Then to Now (2009). In recognition of his work, Two-Rivers received the 1999 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

In addition to his work as a poet, playwright, and short-story writer, Two-Rivers was heavily involved in American Indian activism throughout his life. While active in the Chicago chapter of the American Indian Movement (AIM), he organized to have an offensive statue of an American Indian removed from the Chicago Historical Society building and was also one of a group of American Indians who occupied a decommissioned US military base as part of a protest. He later focused particularly on the economic betterment of indigenous Americans and worked with organizations such as the American Indian Economic Development Association. He was awarded the 1992 Iron-Eyes Cody Award for Peace in recognition of his contributions as an activist.

Two-Rivers's works continued to be read, performed, anthologized, and studied in the years following his death.

Personal Life

Two-Rivers was married twice and had eight children. After several decades in Chicago, he moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin. He lived there with his longtime partner, filmmaker Beverly Moeser, from 2002 until his death on December 28, 2008, from complications due to lung cancer.

Major Works

Throughout his career as a writer, Two-Rivers sought to explore subjects that were of interest to himself as an individual of indigenous North American descent and that reflected his own experiences and those of his friends and acquaintances in Chicago's urban American Indian community. His body of work largely reflects that goal, with plays, poems, and short stories focusing on subjects such as growing up on a First Nations reserve, experiencing the effects of racism and poverty in the United States, and combating systemic inequality and oppression through political activism and personal resistance. His work is often semiautobiographical, at times incorporating specific elements from his history as an activist affiliated with AIM, an organization launched in the late 1960s to advocate for American Indian civil rights. His dramatic works, many of them produced by his Red Path Theater Company, arose from his own frustration with existing depictions and perceptions of American Indians in theater and American culture. Inspired by political and social issues as well as the slam poetry movement that flourished through Chicago-area events such as the Uptown Poetry Slam, Two-Rivers established himself as a dedicated artist who made substantial and thought-provoking contributions to the fields of literature and theater.

Among the many striking features of Two-Rivers's stage plays is his frequent use of elements from his own history, which can range from small details to compelling anecdotes. The semiautobiographical nature of some of his work is perhaps most obvious in his play Chili Corn, first produced by the Red Path Theater Company in 1997. Set in the mid-1970s, Chili Corn focuses on a young woman, Vanessa "Chili" Corn, who flees her abusive boyfriend and is taken in by AIM members who provide shelter to her during their own political activity. As Two-Rivers notes in the preface to his collection Briefcase Warriors, the play is largely fictional but includes material based on several real-world situations, including the hardships faced by a woman he knew in his community and various details about Chicago in the 1970s. A key plot point in the play concerns a statue at the Chicago Historical Society that depicts an American Indian attacking a white woman, which characters Benny Red-Beaver and Gabriel Peoples find deeply offensive. Benny, director of the Chicago AIM chapter and a resident of the apartment where Chili takes shelter, explains that he is particularly concerned about the statue's effect on children, telling Chili that when he visited the historical society building, children conspicuously avoided being near him after seeing the statue. This anecdote is drawn directly from Two-Rivers's life, and he was in fact one of a group of American Indians who protested the statue and wanted it removed. Like Two-Rivers, Benny and Gabriel both believe that the statue should be removed, but the more radical Gabriel plans not to protest the statue but to bomb it as a means of furthering the AIM's cause. A series of complications prevents Gabriel from carrying out his plan, and the statue is ultimately removed without being bombed. In elaborating on an element of his own life in a fictional context, Two-Rivers not only renders his fictional activists more authentic but also calls attention to the differing viewpoints regarding how best to deal with the injustices faced by Chicago's American Indian community.

Throughout Chili Corn, Two-Rivers demonstrates the diverse nature of the American Indian community and the members of AIM. Although both groups may have at times been presented as monolithic by non-indigenous writers, the characters of Chili Corn aptly reflect some of the many differing backgrounds and perspectives found within indigenous populations and advocacy organizations. Chili herself is of Chippewa heritage and, like some in Two-Rivers's own social circle, was raised in an urban environment. Having been physically and sexually abused by her boyfriend, who is also an American Indian, she has become wary of American Indian men and exhibits doubts when Benny treats that identity as a sign of character. Benny, like Two-Rivers himself, is a Canadian-born Chicago resident of Ojibwa heritage, and his approach as a leader of the Chicago branch of AIM is more philosophical than that of fellow activist Gabriel. Of Menominee heritage, Gabriel is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and his status as such gives Benny—and Two-Rivers—the opportunity to call attention to the respect given to veterans in American Indian circles. This element of the play further ties the work to Two-Rivers's life: his younger brother was killed in the Vietnam War, and the playwright subsequently displayed a clear respect for American Indian veterans as well as a strong opposition to war. The fourth character in Chili Corn, Rosario Chavis, is from Mexico and is of mixed indigenous and European descent. While Rosario acknowledges that some individuals with similar heritage do not consider themselves to be American Indians, she asserts that she does, even though she does not speak an indigenous language. Chili replies that many American Indians do not speak indigenous languages but are "still Indians—if only in their hearts," calling further attention to the diversity found within the American Indian population.

While several of Two-Rivers's works are recognizably inspired by his own experiences and those of other members of the Chicago American Indian community, his oeuvre is not exclusively characterized by realism. Rather, his plays at times delve into more allegorical or folkloric modes of storytelling that, as he wrote in his preface to Briefcase Warriors, were inspired by the stories his maternal grandmother told him as a child. Two-Rivers does not simply adapt his grandmother's stories in a straightforward manner but instead uses them as a starting point for narratives that often have distinctly environmentalist messages. His one-act play Winter Summit, or The Bang-Bang Incident, which debuted at Chicago's Newberry Library in 1999, focuses on a group of animals who are gathering for an annual summit. The animals, who include a lynx, a wolf, a beaver, a squirrel, and several types of birds, discuss troubling events taking place in their wilderness home that are being caused by creatures they call Bang-Bangs. The Bang-Bangs have built a highway through the forest, conducted mining operation that have led to the death of fish and other local animals, placed a bounty on the lynx, and killed multiple wolves. Hoping to learn more about the Bang-Bangs, the group sends the chickadee representative to spy on the intruders. The play ends with the animals proclaiming the bravery of the chickadee, but Two-Rivers does not report on what the bird discovers during the reconnaissance mission. Indeed, there is no need for him to do so; as the lynx notes, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out who [the Bang-Bangs] were." Encroaching on the animals' lands, humans have begun to devastate the natural landscape without regard for its existing residents.

Two-Rivers takes a similarly environmentalist approach in his one-act play Coyote Sits in Judgment, which he also identified as inspired by stories told by his grandmother. Unlike Winter Summit, Coyote Sits in Judgement features only one animal—the titular coyote—but also includes as characters the anthropomorphized concepts of business and technology. The play is structured as a court hearing in which Coyote is set to judge a dispute between Business and Technology, each of which argues that the other is harmful to the world but considers itself blameless. Unable to convince either Business or Technology to stop exploiting the earth, Coyote reminds them that "what you do to Mother Earth, you do unto yourselves." The harm that humans cause to the earth and to their fellow living beings for the purpose of earning profits or advancing technology, Two-Rivers suggests, will one day come back to haunt them.

In addition to exploring the effects of human development on the environment, some of Two-Rivers's work addresses the impact that such development can have on indigenous peoples. Although Winter Summit focuses primarily on its animal protagonists, Two-Rivers suggests a clear distinction between the Bang-Bangs and the indigenous human inhabitants of the area when one of the animals notes that "the Indians aren't too happy" about the events taking place. That detail identifies the Bang-Bangs as non-indigenous and demonstrates their disregard for not only the lives of the region's native animals but also the sovereignty of its indigenous people. Two-Rivers takes a similar approach in his two-act play Shattered Dream, which combines the playwright's focus on the environment with his interest in social issues affecting American Indians and, like Chili Corn and others of his plays, draws some inspiration from actual events. Chronicling the events surrounding a hydroelectric company's attempt to build a new dam on indigenous land in Canada, the play was inspired by conflicts surrounding the real-world company Hydro-Quebec's efforts to establish facilities on land populated by First Nations people in Quebec and the social and environmental ramifications of such projects. Shattered Dream relocates the conflict to Ontario, a region with which Two-Rivers was more personally familiar, and further explores the diversity of the indigenous North American experience through its presentation of First Nations individuals and American Indians from vastly different backgrounds.

Principal Works

Drama

Old Indian Trick, or An Old Urban Indian Story as Told by an Old Urban Indian Who May Have Lied, 1994

Forked Tongues, 1995

Shattered Dream, 1996

Chili Corn, 1997

Coyote Sits in Judgment, 1998

Winter Summit, or The Bang-Bang Incident, 1999

Poetry

A Dozen Cold Ones, 1992

Pow Wows, Fat Cats, and Other Indian Tales, 2003

Short Fiction

Survivor's Medicine, 1998

Bibliography

Haugo, Ann. "Native American Drama: A Historical Survey." Indigenous North American Drama: A Multivocal History, edited by Birgit Däwes, State U of New York P, 2013, pp. 39–61.

Jensen, Trevor. "E. Donald Two-Rivers 1945–2008: Ojibwa Poet, Playwright." Chicago Tribune, 8 Jan. 2009, articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-01-08/news/0901070789‗1‗native-americans-uptown-ojibwa-indian. Accessed 31 Dec. 2017.

Bibliography

Gomez, Michele S. "Red Path Theater Company: Bringing Native-American Artists into the Spotlight and onto the Stage at Truman College." The Chronicle of Columbia College Chicago, 2 Dec. 1996, p. 2. DigitalCommons @ Columbia College Chicago, digitalcommons.colum.edu/cadc‗chronicle/366/. Accessed 31 Dec. 2017.

"In Memory of E. Donald Two-Rivers." ChicagoPoetry.com, 29 Dec. 2008, chicagopoetry.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1216. Accessed 31 Dec. 2017.

Pettit, Alexander. "Published Native American Drama, 1970–2011." The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, edited by James Howard Cox and Daniel Heath Justice, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 266–83.

Review of Survivor's Medicine, by E. Donald Two-Rivers. Publishers Weekly, 21 Sept. 1998, p.75. Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=1109036&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 31 Dec. 2017.

Two-Rivers, E. Donald. Briefcase Warriors: Stories for the Stage. U of Oklahoma P, 2001.

Two-Rivers, E. Donald. "E. Donald Two-Rivers." WritersNet, CrowdGather, www.writers.net/writers/15687. Accessed 31 Dec. 2017.