Archive

Archive for April 20, 2013

Wounded Knee still battleground for some per new book by journalist-author Stew Magnuson

April 20, 2013 2 comments

Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in S.D.  The name evokes many things to many people.  First of all, it depends on which of the two most notorious episodes associated with Wounded Knee you’re referring to:  the 1890 massacre of Native American men, women, and children by the U.S. 7th Calvary or the 1973 occupation of this small outpost and surrounding territory by American Indian Movement activists.  Even when you fix on one of these dark events, there’s a mix of feelings aroused, including among the very people who experienced the occupation on one side or the other.  Journalist-author Stew Magnuson’s new book Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding takes the measure of the wildly different interpretations of who bears culpability for what was supposed to be a peaceful protest turning ugly and violent.  My story about Magnuson and his book is soon to appear in The Reader (www.thereader.com).

 

 

 

 

 

Wounded Knee still battleground for some per new book by journalist-author Stew Magnuson

©by Leo Adam Biga

Appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Journalist and author Stew Magnuson’s new book Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding finds virtually every survivor of that 71-day occupation on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in S.D. sullied in some way.

The book by this Omaha native, who did a Peace Corps stint before a freelance correspondent career, explains how what began as a symbolic stand protesting historic wrongs to native peoples ended up a deadly siege. Its American Indian Movement organizers became heroes to some and criminals to others.

As the site of an 1890 atrocity committed by U.S. 7th Calvary troops against the Lakota Sioux, Wounded Knee was a powerful stage to send a message. But when the peaceful occupation turned violent confrontation between activists and authorities the symbology got lost amid the resulting deaths, injuries, property damage, theft and bitter feelings. The ensuing trials uncovered misdeeds on both sides but fell short of satisfying truth or justice.

Magnuson describes how everyone involved has very different interpretations of events that spring in 1973.

“Everyone’s got a piece of the puzzle and a legitimate point of view, but there’s a lot of b.s.,” he says. “There’s the possibility some very nefarious things happened inside there.”

A key figure in the occupation was the late AIM leader Russell Means, whom Magnuson says was “an endlessly fascinating character. All the world was a stage to him. He kept that angry young man persona up to the very end.”

Magnuson discovered how far apart the factions can be at an Augustana College (S.D) .conference last April that gathered AIM leaders and opponents together. His 2008 book The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder and its look at border town problems got him invited as a presenter. But he also went as a journalist.

“It was everything I thought it was going to be. Lots of fireworks, a lot of people yelling at each other and accusing each other of being liars. I’d never covered         anything like that.”

He’s covered a lot too. Racial strife, cultures clashing.

 

 

 

Stew Magnuson

 

 

He was visiting here between jobs in 1999 when he came upon a story that led him to Pine Ridge. He read about a recent riot in the border town of Whiteclay, Neb. and plans by AIM leaders to march there and by the state patrol to respond.

“This had all the elements of things I’d been covering,” says Magnuson. “I’d been told by some newspaper they didn’t think I could be a reporter in my own country, so I kind of took umbrage at that and called the Christian Science Monitor about covering this unfolding story.”

He got the assignment.

“A couple years later I decided to look more into Whiteclay and stumbled across the Yellow Thunder story.”

The Oglala Sioux was killed by a group of whites in a 1972 racially motivated attack in Gordon, Neb. That event and the trial that followed galvanized AIM and its Wounded Knee occupation the next year. Coming to the story three decades later, Magnuson saw the makings of a book.

“I just threw myself into the project. I went and worked in a salmon cannery in Alaska for the summer to raise money to go up to Sheridan County (Neb.) and live there as long as I could to do the research.”

His Yellow Thunder Book won high praise. When the Augustana conference came around he saw an opportunity for a piece of long form journalism or a short book timed with the 40th anniversary of the Wounded Knee occupation. He found a publisher in Now and Then Reader.

He says a comprehensive account of what happened still needs writing. In his book virtually every occupation figure has a self-serving ax to grind. An exception is Adrienne Fritze. As a 12-year old she was held captive with her family. She went to Augustana hoping for reconciliation and an apology. She got neither.

“There’s some people who want a kind of truth telling commission. Well, we really don’t have a mechanism for that in America. The main mystery that needs to be resolved is what happened to (civil rights activist) Ray Robinson. It’s very well established he was inside the occupied village and has not been seen since. He has a family asking about where he is. His widow was at the conference.”

He says “the bigger historical questions of what did the occupation mean and what were its implications” are matters “people will be debating for decades to come. Did it raise awareness to the very real grievances, like the abuse of border schools and terrible government policies that AIM wanted to bring attention to? I would argue yes it did. But it brought years of violence afterwards, It stopped the progression of the reservation. It was kind of devastating for Pine Ridge.”

He says if anyone’s to write the full story they need to hurry, “A lot of these participants are not going to be with us a whole lot longer.”

Meanwhile, Magnuson, whose day job is managing editor of National Defense Magazine based in Washington D.C., hopes to finish a book on Highway 83. His backroads adventures on it as a boy and young man sparked his wanderlust life.

He will sign copies of his Wounded Knee book starting at 12:30 p.m. on April 28 at The Bookworm.

He muses on Native American issues on his “View from a Washichu” (white guy) blog, http://www.stewmagnuson.blogspot.com.

 

During the occupation, ©framework.latimes.com

Related articles
Categories: Authors/Literature, History, Journalism, Native American, Social Justice, Stew Magnuson, Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding, Writing Tags: ,

Omaha playwright Beaufield Berry comes into her own with original comedy “Psycho Ex Girlfriend”

April 20, 2013 6 comments

Writers come in all packages.  Few are packaged as colorfully as Beaufield Berry, a young, talented Omaha playwright who’s just coming into her own as a force to be reckoned with.  Her new original comedy, Psycho Ex Girlfriend, is now playing at the Shelterbelt Theatre in town.  My profile of Berry is soon to appear in The Reader (www.thereader.com).  It won’t surprise me if her work eventually gets produced in theaters regionally and nationally.

 

 

Beaufield Berry, ©femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com

 

 

Omaha playwright Beaufield Berry comes into her own with original comedy “Psycho Ex Girlfriend”

©by Leo Adam Biga

Appeared in The Reader (www.thereader.com)

 

Everything about one of Omaha’s bright new playwrights bespeaks exotica, starting with her name, Beaufield Berry. This biracial, bicoastal creative with model good looks has worked as an actor, a singer, a VIP dancer, a burlesque performer, a mud wrestler and a horse ranch entertainment director.

She’s into body-building. She’s fallen in and out of love. She’s suffered broken hearts and broken a few herself. She’s written several plays, a novel, a television pilot and many poems. She’s had works read at the Great Plains Theatre Conference. One ended up staged in New York. Another in Philadelphia.

Her self-described original full-length “dark comedy,Psycho Ex Girlfriend, is in the midst of a month-long run at the Shelterbelt Theatre, 3225 California St., where it continues through May 12. Playwright and former Shelterbelt artistic director Ellen Struve is a champion of Berry’s work. So is new artistic director, ElizaBeth Thompson, who directs the show.

Fans of Omaha native author and playwright Rachel Shukert will find a similar satiric voice in Berry.

Berry calls her play’s title character, Britte, a “crazy, kooky, quirky girl,” adding, “Parts of the show I wouldn’t say are autobiographical but I wouldn’t say they’re extremely foreign to me either. When I was writing the show I had myself kind of in mind. It was a really cathartic writing experience from beginning to end. I was sharing my writing as I usually do with my close, intimate friends, my best friend Katie Beacom-Hurst being one of them. So when it was done at the Shelterbelt Reading Series (in 2012) we had the luxury of hand-picking the cast and there was no one else I wanted to play Britte but Katie, someone who knows me inside out and has watched me take this journey.”

Beacom-Hurst landed the same role in the current Shelterbelt production. Britte’s best friends, KB and Didi, played by Katlynn Yost and Kaitlyn McClincy, morph into several more characters to create a Greek chorus. The boyfriend, Matt, is played by Nick LeMay, who also plays other male roles.

Berry started Psycho in 2010. By 2011 it lagged as she found herself stuck in a bad case of writer’s block.

“It wasn’t until I went to Central America by myself for two months on this soul journey to Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador that I really had a breakthrough.

Once I got out of my surroundings and got alone and foreign the show became really close to the play that’s being performed.”

Berry has another full-length play, He’s Here, being considered for a month-long workshop by the Raven Theatre in Chicago.

It’s a full resume for anyone, especially for the just-turned 29 artist who after years of flitting around has finally settled down. She has a real job at Rebel Interactive, an Omaha branding agency.

“I’ve always had a sense of independence, I’ve always been a do-what-I-want kind of person,” she says.

Upon returning from Central America she says she felt “transformed.” She’s more purposeful than ever about doing her work and getting it produced. But like most writers she’s beset by insecurities about the very thing she cares so much about.

“When it comes to writing it’s the only thing I feel like I’m here for this reason, so it’s very close, it’s very personal. So it just scares me shitless whenever anybody even says anything good. I can’t believe it.”

Her play The Waiting Line about a cross-section of people awaiting organ transplants received an unusually strong response at its Great Plains reading

“It was overwhelming. I walked in there with my mom and my best friend holding their hands, I was so scared. It was very emotional. It’s nerve wracking for me to hear my words in actors’ mouths.

“But that was by far the best response I’ve had to any of my pieces and I’ve had a lot of positive feedback on other shows. One of my panelists called the show ‘raw and visceral, poetic and lyrical.’ Whoa! What?

“I didn’t set out to be any of those things, it just mused through me…

Words tend to automatically flow through her. Like the poems she puts on Redbubble.

“I don’t edit any of that, it all comes straight-out however it comes. Very organically. I feel like if I work it too much or think about it too much I’m going to take all the life out of it.”

 

 

 

Berry

 

 

The feedback she gets from readings and workshops helps her hone her plays.

She’s long had a writing gift though claiming it as her own has been another thing.

“It’s hard for me to even say gift. I really don’t know where it’s coming from. I am a good writer but I can’t think too highly no matter what somebody else says, no matter what I think because not everything is going to be accepted. I’m going to get rejection letter after rejection letter and that hurts. So I just take everything casually. I’m on pins and needles, every single goddam time.”

Growing up she was steeped in creativity by her artist mother, Pamela Berry, who got Beau started in theater at 14. The home-schooled Berry got her experience at churches where her mom organized theater productions and through the Omaha scouting theater troupe, Explorer Post 619. She says working with the troupe “was a great experience,” adding, “You got to write and direct your own shows. We did some awesome stuff and some really bad stuff, too I happen to know a lot of people in the theater community from the Post – people I met there.”

Her involvement with the Post ended around age 19, when the intrigue of dating took hold. She eloped at 20 and divorced soon after. Then in quick succession she put together a burlesque troupe, the Sparkling Diamonds, that opened for some bands before falling apart. She went off to Vegas, where she went by Carmen Rose. There, she formed a hip-hop dance group and relaunched a new version of Diamonds. She was doing off-strip VIP table dancing when she wound up a paid mud wrestler at a club. She did a stint as a Miller Lite Girl.

What possessed her to lead this Reality TV life.

“Oh, it was Vegas, I was 21, I have no idea. I get bored extremely easily and I have to always be looking for the next big thing or something fun to do. I just want to try everything. Like there’s no reason not to.”

Love took her to New Jersey. Philadelphia became a regular haunt. She did some spoken word there. She appeared in a production of Cabaret. Through it all, she kept writing. Eventually her plays got readings in Philly and one, Ugly Birds,  was performed at Spark Fest.

When her East Coast love affair went bad she went to Telluride, Colo., where she wrote The Waiting Line.

There was also a music sojourn in Calif. and various forays to Europe, Canada, Mexico. Her “traveling self” is so engrained that even though she’s seemingly found in Omaha what she’s been searching for she’ll always be footloose and fancy free.

“I think the majority of my soul will never quite be settled anywhere and that’s why I want to give myself the luxury of traveling to places and staying there for a few months spurt, so I can keep my foot in the world.

“What I really love about Omaha that I didn’t find on either coast is there really is an opportunity to create your own world of whatever your art is. There’s a lot of open doors here and if you’re of an entrepreneurial spirit there’s a lot of doors you can open yourself.”

She’s currently looking at forming her own theater production company.

For tickets to Psycho call 402-341-2757 or visit http://www.shelterbelt.org.

 

Related articles
Categories: Authors/Literature, Beaufield Berry, Comedy/Humor, Entertainment, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Omaha, Playwright, Rebel Interactive, Theater, Writing Tags: , , , , ,
%d bloggers like this: