Review: What I learned from ‘The Aunties’
“I am an auntie like my aunties before me.”
Such were the words of Mickaela Allison, one of three women who told their stories at “The Aunties,” a contemporary Indigenous performance held at the Ellen Eccles Theatre in downtown Logan.
The show is part of a larger project being made into a film documentary. This show was specifically tailored to the Utah area, featuring storytellers from the tribes of this land.
In Indigenous cultures, an auntie is a matriarchal figure who guides the younger generation and passes down her wisdom. The performance featured three aunties, each in a different season of life, telling their story from their lived experience.
As the women performed, I noticed a pattern: The more experience they had, the more relaxed they seemed to be on the stage.
The first storyteller was Allison, a Navajo woman. She chose to tell her story in four parts, as the number four is a significant number in Navajo culture, representing the four directions, seasons and colors.
Allison told her story in a way that was easy to follow, by tying each aspect of her life — from her urban lifestyle, the business she started and the work she does with youth in her community — into her identity as an auntie.
In keeping with the thematic number four, Allison began and ended her story by reciting, “There is beauty again” four times over — a line from the traditional Navajo prayer “The Beauty Way.”
The second storyteller was Randy’L Teton, a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. Contrary to Allison, who sat promptly in a chair to tell her story, reading carefully written words off of a page, Teton stood on the stage in a casual stance. She wanted, she said, to give the audience a sense of where she’s been and where she’s going.
Teton took the audience all the way back to the origins of her last name, drawing a metaphorical historical map. Through learning how her last name came to be — it was essentially forced upon her people by the federal government — her interest in history and museum studies was piqued with this question in her mind: “Why did we keep the names we didn’t choose for ourselves?”
Something Teton is known for is being the model for the Sacagawea dollar coin. When discussing being chosen as the model, she said something that stuck out to me: “The lights shined on me because of the way I looked.” She said this not with vanity or pride but with humility in almost a displeased, disappointed way.
The final storyteller, Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, began her story by walking onto the stage while singing. This proved to be fitting, as the theme woven throughout her piece was the power of using one’s voice.
She shared pieces of her own writing over the years, such as “Water Bodies,” which explores the sacred role of water in many Indigenous cultures. She, like Allison and Teton, shared stories from her childhood, saying that memories are something we get to “fall upon” as adults.
Lopez-Whiteskunk didn’t sit stick-straight in a lone chair or stand to tell her story. She sat comfortably at a table on the stage with Allison and Teton, reading with glasses perched on her nose. By telling her story this way, it felt as though she was embodying the auntie identity in the most authentic way: a warm maternal figure, sitting down to pass down her wisdom to us through gentle yet powerful story telling.
At the end of the performance, when thinking about which storyteller I enjoyed the most, more so than anything, I simply noticed their differences and how they painted a picture of seasons of life.
Allison, the youngest auntie, represented youthful eagerness and thoroughness in telling her story. Teton came across as a witty motherly figure, having told her story many times, with a jaded sense of humor. Lopez-Whiteskunk brought the performance home with a sense of calmness, authenticity and peace.
Rather than explicitly mentioning their identity as an auntie, the two older women wove that sentiment subtly throughout their stories, making it evident without explicitly saying it.
The way each auntie told her story taught me there seems to be a lovely sageness and wisdom that comes with time spent in this world and a sense of understanding that comes with experience.