Posted on November 24, 2025 in Interviews
This TIE Talks features Dr. Bethany Hughes, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the Department of American Culture and faculty member in the Native American Studies Program. In this interview, we chat with Bethany about her book, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. The first title to center on redface in American theater, the book reveals how the racialization of the “Stage Indian” perpetuates racist and settler colonist mythology to deny Native sovereignty. Here, Bethany delves into redface’s history, Native American representation, and the unique qualities of stage performance. In addition, she shares how she hopes her book contributes to her field and previews her forthcoming title on Indigenous theatre history.
American audiences are knowledgeable about blackface and the negative impact it has had, and theatre and performance scholars are aware if not familiar with the robust body of literature that interrogates blackface minstrelsy. Blackface is many people’s way into a consideration of racial representation and racial impersonation. There are many resonances and overlaps between blackface and other forms of racial representation/impersonation, such as redface, yellowface, and brownface. However, they are not identical in their racial (and racializing) logics nor are they the same in their social and political impacts. Blackface shares technologies with redface, but does not create the same end product. For example, both are racializing performance techniques that assign or affix racial meaning to material and immaterial substances like costumes, dialect, and character traits. However, blackface participates in the racial logic of blackness as that which persists and overpowers as seen in the “one drop rule” that declared a strict racial boundary around blackness. Redface, in contrast, participates in the racial logic of “Indianness” as that which disappears. Blood quantum is used to demonstrate the ongoing disappearance of the Indian rather than its persistence. These are both racializing projects but they are not identical.
The United States has always struggled with categorizing Native Americans. Essentially, the U.S. is unsure how to parse the relationship between being a people and being a polity. Because of that there are two competing interpretations for what Native Americans are and therefore how the U.S. should interact with them. On the one hand, Indians were seen as an inferior racial group that either needed to be eliminated, uplifted, or assimilated depending on one’s viewpoint. On the other hand, Indians were seen as tribes, political entities with authority over land and law. These sovereign tribes required a different kind of interaction, in general, either war or diplomacy. Redface enters this conversation as part of the first interpretation, understanding Indians as a race. Redface gives the idea of a racialized Indian a physical form, attaches that form to narrative logics that support it, and circulates a legible Indian. The narrative logics that prop up redface are shaped by conceptions of Indianness as a substance that is always on the edge of extinction or is already gone. This idea of the vanishing Indian has appeared in U.S. government actions across the 19th and 20th centuries as well as in narrative entertainment and art forms. Redface denies the existence of tribal sovereignty because within redface tribes are interchangeable spaces where the Indian resides. In reality, tribes are distinct political entities. Because of redface’s insistence upon the racialized Indian as the legible Indian, it forecloses Indigenous nationhood. The stakes of redface are not just racial or cultural; they are political. If you take seriously the governmental authority of tribes, which is typically preferred by Native American nations, then redface can be understood as an attack on tribes as political formations.
The argument I develop in the book is actually focused largely on the physicality of redface and the co-presence of audience and artist. Live theatrical performance is the place where bodies exist in time and space together and actors and audiences work together to make stories meaningful. Because of this theatre is the most efficacious place for redface. In film or other forms of visual media the viewer or consumer encounters an often two-dimensional image. The co-constructive process of making a legible Indian image is happening, but there is no physical, real-life component to it. In theatre, artists are making choices to represent and enflesh a character in a way that is legible to an audience. An audience is interpreting and bringing their own knowledge into the theatre building. Both the work of the artist and the work of the audience occur on/through the actor’s body. Redface in theatre is working through the same object, the body, that race in everyday life works through. This is the unique power of theatrical performance for racialized representation. It is real bodies in real time activating narratives, racial meaning, and split-second interpretation. My book is concerned with the mechanisms of redface because they are the mechanisms that Native Americans are forced to contend with in everyday life. Theatre is closer to everyday life than film or television because we all experience the world through our bodies and in relationship with other people’s physical presence.
Redface in theatre is working through the same object, the body, that race in everyday life works through. This is the unique power of theatrical performance for racialized representation. It is real bodies in real time activating narratives, racial meaning, and split-second interpretation.
As a new scholar developing this project I often encountered questions that framed the subject in cause and effect terms. “Did theatrical redface cause Americans to mistreat Indians?” “Did American racial logics make redface racist?” I found these questions often posed a “chicken or the egg” situation and sought a causative relationship. In my research I developed a different understanding of the subject. Drawing on the now decades old understanding of theatre as something that reflects and shapes culture, I became less focused on finding a redface smoking gun and more interested in locating the patterns of thought and action that redface relies upon, reveals, and suggests. In effect, I found the relationship between redface, race, and Indigeneity was more like comorbidity than causation. When you have a settler colonial government interacting with Indigenous nations, you are very likely to have outgrowths of colonial political, racial, and economic logic that appear across cultural institutions. These institutions range from education to entertainment to law to religion. My book looks at how the cultural institution of theatrical entertainment interacts with other cultural institutions, like the law and literature, to show how they are all reflecting and shaping a shared sense of the Indian. The question of cause and effect, I found, was the wrong question to ask because it assumed a particular kind of relationship between two things. Instead, what I found was that I needed to ask a different question, which was “What travels together and interacts in the formation of redface?”
Within the field of Native American studies time and space is always set aside to carefully define terms and to identify their limitations. There is no perfect term to encompass all Indigenous experiences. There are terms that are better at certain things and worse at others. Therefore, choosing the term you employ and being honest about its strength and limitations is really important. Indian as a word is imprecise, has been used as a pejorative term, and is used to homogenize peoples to their detriment. It has also been widely used for centuries, carries multiple meanings, is employed in different registers, and has ongoing power to activate ideas and histories in the mind of the hearer or user. It is still used and useful. That does not mean it is harmless. In my book I am trying to specifically talk about the ways that the word Indian has been used to connect an embodied fiction (redface) to Indigenous peoples’ bodies and lives. I am making an argument about imprecision, derogatory language, and racial homogenization. So I use the word as a tool with the understanding you can also wield it as a weapon.
I wanted readers to have the opportunity to be aware of their own contribution to the creation of the legible Indian and to have a glimpse at what it would mean to undo the Indian’s supremacy in American theatre.
I’ve been reading and teaching academic books for long enough to know that how people read them is not always how the author intends. I decided to embrace that ‘choose your own adventure’ spirit in structuring the book. Also, as an interdisciplinary scholar I fully expect different parts of the book to resonate and be useful in different conversations, and wanted to allow for that kind of selection as best suits a situation. Those are the practical reasons for planning multiple pathways through this book. The intellectual and argumentative reasons are about disciplinary conversations, interest in form, and investment in embodiment. The book argues that redface isn’t just a racist costuming practice, it is a collaborative process through which audiences and artists affix the idea of an Indian to a physical body. I wanted readers to have the opportunity to be aware of their own contribution to the creation of the legible Indian and to have a glimpse at what it would mean to undo the Indian’s supremacy in American theatre.
The essay “Hinushi Inla” is both a disciplinary inclusion and a formal argument that is activated through the reader’s body. As a Native American studies scholar, it was important to offer readers an alternative to the hegemony of the Indian and to point out how that hegemony has always been less hegemonic than one might assume. But the shape of the essay, interspersed in small sections across the book in a non-sequential cadence, was the result of my interest in form as argument. To pay attention to Indigenous performance rather than assume the Stage Indian of redface is to work differently as a reader/viewer. It requires using translatable skills learned as a theatre-going audience, but those skills are put to a different use. Using skills differently is not comfortable nor easy at first. And the concerted effort it will take to articulate a theatrical vision of Indigeneity is significant. Not impossible. Just hard. I wanted readers to experience a taste of what it would mean to participate in that hard work, work that is interesting and rewarding and exciting, but still tiring. Maybe if you can hunt down pages across a book you can hunt down truthful depictions of Indigenous life.
My book is the first book-length work to focus upon redface in American theatre. There is much more to study and to say about the subject of Native American representation in the U.S. and beyond. There is also much more to say about Indigenous performance history and current developments. I hope my book clarifies the mechanisms performance brings to the subject of representation and illuminates the stakes of the conversation for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. My next project is a short book called Theatre and Indigeneity, which will be coming out as part of Methuen Drama’s Theatre And series maybe in late 2026 (the manuscript is currently out for review). It introduces readers to Indigeneity as a concept, Indigenous theatre history, and the various components and characteristics of the art being made by Indigenous theatre artists. It is a really fun project for me since so much of my focus in Redface was on harmful or inaccurate representation of Native Americans. This project is just about the innovative, thoughtful, funny, and beautiful work Indigenous theatre artists have made and are making.
Bethany Hughes (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in the Department of American Culture and a core faculty member in the Native American Studies Program. A performance scholar and cultural historian, her work focuses on the representation of Native Americans in theatrical performance and contemporary Indigenous theatre. Her book, Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity, published by New York University Press, articulates the aesthetic, racial, and political implications of the “Indian” in live theatre. It has won the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Labriola National American Indian Data Center’s Book Award, and co-won the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. It was also a finalist for the John W. Frick Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society. Her 2018 article “Oka Apesvchi” received the Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research. Hughes teaches classes on Native American Studies, Indigenous performance, race and musical theatre, American performance, and critical university studies. Her writing can be found in Theatre Journal, American Periodicals, Theatre Survey, Mobilities, Theatre Topics, and HowlRound.com. Her current project is a short book titled Theatre and Indigeneity, which is forthcoming from Methuen Drama.
This interview was conducted by Sabrina Cofer. She is the digital media producer at Choice.
This interview feature invites academics, librarians, teaching faculty, and higher education stakeholders to discuss their latest projects and research. Spotlighting both early and late career researchers, TIE Talks aims to sit down with fascinating individuals whose engaging and informative work inspires others in their fields and intersects with DEIA topics.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.
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