About Red Mother
Incorporating the weaving of traditional and contemporary stories in words, dance and images, Red Mother explores the many facets of legacy and memory through the eyes of an old Indigenous woman who has lived through a great upheaval in Indigenous history.
This is the captivating story of Belle, the Red Mother, who travels across what was once Indigenous land with her horse and companion, Blue Fred. She is absorbed at every turn into the conflicts that changed the nature of life and culture for Indigenous people living on what is now known as Turtle Island. She survives in any way that she can, embracing the murky underside of humanity.
Popular culture and mainstream history perpetuate the fiction of Indigenous women as virtuous, noble earth mothers. This is the stereotype and it’s as insidious today as it has been for the past four centuries. Contemporary Indigenous women continue to be defined in terms of those stereotypes not only in the dominant culture but also within their own communities. Red Mother explodes the stereotype and looks at an old woman and what her life might really have been.
Belle symbolizes the craven women who lived then and who live among us now, the failed mothers, the prostitutes and addicts, women who were and are a significant force in the survival of our communities. They are part of our communities whether we recognize it or not. Belle embodies their spirits that linger with us now because of their treacherousness and complicity in horrible events for which they have never made amends. The show moves through past and present, the real world and the spirit world and is woven throughout and punctuated with demon stories which are part of the creation story of the Kuna nation.