Indians by Arthur Kopit

First published: 1969

First produced: 1968, at the Aldwych Theatre, London

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The late nineteenth century

Locale: The Wild West and Washington, D.C.

Principal Characters:

• Buffalo Bill Cody,
• Wild Bill Hickok, and
• Annie Oakley, characters from the Old West
• Sitting Bull,
• John Grass,
• Geronimo, and
• Spotted Tail, Native Americans from the Old West
• Senator Logan,
• Senator Dawes, and
• Senator Morgan, emissaries of the president
• Ol’ Time President, a U.S. president of the late nineteenth century
• Ned Buntline, a newsman

The Play

In the opening scene of Indians, a buffalo skull, a bloodstained Indian shirt, and an old rifle serve to provide historical atmosphere as Buffalo Bill Cody enters, riding an artificial stallion. At once, the audience learns that it is seeing a rendition of Buffalo Bill’s famous “Wild West Show.” Indians, too, are present; Cody claims to them, to the audience, and to himself that “I believe I . . . am a . . . hero . . . A GODDAM HERO!”

The next scene is set outdoors in the winter, somewhere in the West. Sitting Bull and other chieftains greet Buffalo Bill in the company of three United States senators, emissaries of and substitutes for the president, who has not come to the Indian council to discuss shared problems, even though Cody promised to bring him. Cody calls the Native Americans his brothers, but his use of the word is shallow and hypocritical. In the following scene, Cody continues to discuss the Native Americans’ plight with them, but the audience has seen him callously destroying the livelihood of the Native Americans, shooting one hundred buffalo. Ned Buntline, the reporter who first made Buffalo Bill a popular American hero, is oblivious to the import of this destruction. The Native Americans are depicted as victims and the white people as callous and unworthy adversaries and victors.

Scene 4, the shortest in the play, shows both the senators and Sitting Bull’s Lakota community watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Scene 5 is this show itself, something of a play-within-the-play: Geronimo, by reputation the fiercest fighter against the coming of the white settlers, parades around the stage pitifully, a pale imitation of his former self, while boasting vainly about past atrocities against white people.

The next scene is the structural center of the play. Here, the three senators interview John Grass, a Native American spokesman who has some knowledge of the ways and thinking of the white people. Grass wants to know what happened to the money the federal government had used to purchase the Black Hills from the Native Americans. Senator Dawes’s reply is that “the Great Father is worried that you’ve not been educated enough to spend it wisely. When he feels you have, you will receive every last penny of it. Plus interest.” The senator explains that the money is in a “trust.” Grass also lists other verbal promises that the whites have not kept, among them a promise to deliver a steamboat to the plains. The meeting ends with the native community reminding Cody that he has not brought the Great White Father himself, the president, to talk to them as he promised.

In the second half of the play the action shifts first to the White House and then back to the Old West. In scene 7, the longest one, Buffalo Bill, Buntline, and Wild Bill Hickok all play themselves in a performance wherein an indigenous princess is saved but a large number of braves (also playing themselves) die. The First Family finds the play exciting; indeed, the First Lady is attracted to Wild Bill, who is, in turn, attracted to the Italian woman playing the part of the princess. The scene ends with Hickok tearing at her clothes.

The next scene returns to the discussion between the senators and John Grass. Clearly, misunderstanding on the parts of the white people and Native Americans alike has been a key factor in the victimization of the “red man.” Specific items of the treaty are discussed, as Arthur Kopit juxtaposes the two cultures: The two groups cannot communicate with each other about land ownership, farm life, self-sufficiency, and whiskey. The situation is hopeless at every turn.

When scene 9 opens, for the third time in Indians the audience sees bits and snatches of the Wild West Show. Annie Oakley has joined the performance and does trick shots with her gun; to the cast of Native Americans Chief Joseph is added, to give his famous speech which culminates with “I will fight no more, forever.” At the end of the Wild West spectacular, Grass, having given up on conveying anything to the senators, appears to lead the Native Americans in a forbidden sun dance in which he sticks barbs into his chest muscles until the loss of blood causes him to collapse.

Scene 10 is a flashback to the meeting between Buffalo Bill and the Ol’ Time President at which the president refused to travel to the West to meet with the indigenous leaders; the viewer now learns that this meeting followed the performance of scene 7, in which Buffalo Bill and others appeared before the First Family. Cody dramatically tells the president that without his help the Native Americans and their way of life will die. The president will not help, and he calls Cody a fool for promising Sitting Bull that he would go to the West and talk to them personally. Instead, the president will “send a committee,” and the fate of the Native Americans is assured: Extinction is inevitable.

For the third time in the play, the audience sees the committee at work. Again, the helplessness of the native community in the face of impending death is emphasized. Viewers realize that each side considers the other stupid. Buffalo Bill acknowledges that “if their way o’ seein’ is hard for us t’ follow, ours is just as hard for them.” At the high point of this scene, Sitting Bull, with full dignity yet in total desperation, suggests, “Tell the Great Father that if he wishes us to live like white men, we will do so.” His Lakota community is stunned, but he proceeds to request that the president send the Lakota food, since “I have never yet seen a white man starving.” He requests cattle, mules, horses, buggies, oxen, and wagons too, “for that is the way the white man lives, and we want to please the Great Father and live the same way.”

Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Poncho make brief appearances in the next scene, playing themselves as villains and as replacements of the Native Americans. Ironically, Buffalo Bill would now try to help Sitting Bull’s village, but he himself had led in destroying the buffalo. Too late, he realizes that in killing buffalo he was also killing Native Americans.

The next scene concludes the play. A reporter interviews Colonel Forsythe and other soldiers who have just defeated the Native Americans in a post-Custer skirmish. Entering for a final conversation, Sitting Bull tells Buffalo Bill that he cannot understand why he killed the buffalo while professing love for indigenous communities. Sitting Bull acknowledges that acting in the Wild West Show had been humiliating, an imitation of his glory, and Buffalo Bill himself reveals that one of his greatest fears is that he will die with his makeup (rather than boots) on. The play ends with a repentant Buffalo Bill talking of what he has done; as he does so, some ten Native Americans are brought in one by one to die onstage. The last among these is Chief Joseph, who concludes the play by repeating, “I will fight no more, forever.”

Dramatic Devices

Some critics have too quickly categorized Indians as an absurdist drama. Arthur Kopit’s play does meet some of the requirements of the Theater of the Absurd. His perspective of the human condition probably meets this criterion; the form of the play is not very realistic; its events do not unfold in a direct, connected fashion; and finally, and most important, the characters seemingly exist in a meaningless universe.

Kopit’s method, however, does not ultimately qualify the play as absurdist. The reality of what white individuals did to the buffalo and to the Native Americans was absurd, as Bill Cody comes to realize; the inability of the two races to communicate is absurd; for Cody to promise to bring the president to the Native Americans is absurd; and for the indigenous communities to demand a steamboat for the plains and mountains is absurd. These things show that life is absurd, but they do not make history into absurdist drama.

Similarly, the play’s unusual form and the nonchronological order in which events are given do not make the play absurdist. While the bulk of the play is based on historical facts, in many places Kopit takes dramatic license by having characters who never actually met each other talk to and interact with each other; episodes are not rendered sequentially; and conversations can be somewhat bizarre and existential. These devices make the play different and unusual, but there is an overall order to the play.

Of Indians’ other dramatic devices, the most prominent is that of the play-within-the-play. The various scenes of the Wild West Show are used to emphasize what Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull, and others were reduced to: The Old West and the Native Americans were dead as people and as a way of life, long before these figures from history actually died. The playwright conveys the same point with Ned Buntline’s play, which is presented by Buffalo Bill and his friends at the White House. The audience is thus three times removed from reality (once in Buntline’s play, once in Kopit’s, and once in their own chairs) and should thereby have enough distance to have a healthy perspective.

Critical Context

Indians was first produced in the summer of 1968, the year of the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., had recently been shot, the country had just experienced explosive racial tension in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War was in one of its bloodiest periods. Because of these social and political realities, Arthur Kopit took the play to London for its world premiere. Although early reviewers were not unanimous in their praise, it seems clear that Indians will survive (it is being reprinted in anthologies) not because of its implicit criticism of the Vietnam War but because it is so effective at raising questions about American identity and self-image. The play transcends its immediate political context. It is a haunting reminder that the United States, despite its many accomplishments, has faults at its core that have not yet been fully confronted in the national conscience. Whether American involvement in Vietnam was just or unjust is not now at issue. More important, and far more central to Indians, is the problem of American identity. The play succeeds because it pricks the collective conscience—and perhaps the collective guilt—about its subject matter.

Of other plays written by Kopit, Indians most closely resembles End of the World (pr., pb. 1984). The latter looks to the United States’ future rather than its past; in this future, the playwright finds certain nuclear destruction. The nuclear arms race and the ineffectual treaties it occasions are shown to be as absurd as the American conquest of the West; as in Indians, there is a play-within-a-play; life is depicted as absurd and uncontrollable; and the main character, a private investigator-playwright, is much akin to Buffalo Bill. Other Kopit plays include Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad: A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition (pr., pb. 1960), Wings (pr., pb. 1978), End of the World with Symposium to Follow (pr., pb. 1984), Success (pr. 1991, pb. 1992), Discovery of America (pr. 1992), and Y2K (pr., pb. 1999; later retitled BecauseHeCan).

Sources for Further Study

Gross, Karl. “The Larger Perspective: Author Kopit’s Indians and the Vietnam War.” In Modern War on Stage and Screen. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1997.

Jenkins, Linda Walsh. “A Gynocratic Feminist Perspective in the Case of Kopit’s Indians.” In Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995.

Jiji, Vera M. “Indians: A Mosaic of Memories and Methodologies.” Players 47 (Summer, 1972): 230-236.

Jones, John B. “Impersonation and Authenticity: The Theatre as Metaphor in Kopit’s Indians.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (December, 1973): 443-451.

O’Neill, Michael C. “History as Dramatic Present: Arthur L. Kopit’s Indians.” Theatre Journal 34 (December, 1982): 493-504.

Weales, Gerald. “Arthur Kopit.” In Contemporary Dramatists. 6th ed. Detroit: St. James, 1999.

Weaver, Laura. “Arthur Kopit.” In American Playwrights Since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism, and Performance. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.