Renata Birkenbuel
Special for ICT
MISSOULA, Mont. — A mind-blowing set, fine across-the-board acting and a mother’s persistent, poignant leadership transformed an original staged reading into a fully realized, unforgettable missing and murdered Indigenous people play.
Passionate and ripe with symbolism, Can’t Drink Salt Water opened to a packed house at the Montana Repertory Theater in early February. It ran through Feb. 22, but its impact may greatly outlast its first enactment.
Thanks to a generous grant from The Roy Cockrum Foundation, Missoula playwright Kendra Mylnechuk Potter, Lummi, and crew were able to gather the best theatrical community for an issue that increasingly takes community to help find sex-trafficked loved ones.
At a time when sex trafficking of minors and young women of various ethnicities saturates the global daily news, Mylnechuk Potter’s drama pointedly conveys a Native mother’s heartbreak of losing her daughter to abductors.
Trafficking is visceral during the play, as the audience experiences the highs and lows of the mother’s agonizing search through interactive exchange and an ever-changing high-tech set.
Mylnechuk Potter said the opening was like literally giving birth from her perspective.
“For me, it was an incredibly emotional experience,” she said. “I sat in the back of the theater and I realized sometime after intermission — probably 2/3 of the way through the play — that I was like, sitting as if I was on a roller coaster that kept going up higher and higher. I was pressed back against the back of the house, white knuckling and all my muscles tense. And why? Well, it felt like labor.”
A robust social media push helped draw a full house of about 450 for the world premiere on the University of Montana campus.
Carissa Heavy Runner, Blackfeet and Diné, dreams that another theater eventually picks it up.
Heavy Runner, a high-profile leader of a group in Arlee on the Flathead Indian Reservation that continues to search for missing Native women and girls, introduced the play on stage, as she did in the 2023 stage reading workshop.
Her testimony remains timely, persuasive and brave.
“This issue, missing and murdered Indigenous people, and human trafficking, are still ongoing today,” Heavy Runner said. “So it’s very important that we — and with the arts, continue — because it’s so powerful.”
Heavy Runner lost her daughter, Mika Westwolf, to a hit-and-run driver as she walked along a highway near the Flathead Indian Reservation on March 31, 2023. She’s had some closure, knowing what happened to Mika and knowing that the driver has been criminally charged and sentenced.
But Heavy Runner does not shy away from public speaking on behalf of all MMIP and Mika, who was an enrolled citizen of the Blackfeet Nation and also Diné (Navajo), Cree, and Klamath.
“It’s getting easier,” Heavy Runner told ICT. “I’ve been doing this for almost three years now. I was nervous in the beginning and it was hard, but there was no other choice. I couldn’t just rely on the media or other people.”
“The way I was raised is, either you complain, which does nothing, or you take action — you say something and you speak up. So that’s what I do,” she added.
Broadening its reach to more Native Americans, and non-Natives as well, the original play delivers a bevy of emotions.
The timeliness of the highly-charged messages could not be better in terms of awareness for all theater-goers, especially non-Natives.
“It reaches people on a whole ‘nother level where they can connect with the parent. They can connect with the grief,” Heavy Runner said. “Just seeing live actors on stage is very different than watching a movie.”
At its core, Can’t Drink Salt Water nullifies ongoing erasure of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples by bringing unbearable grief to light.
The plot is sprinkled with humor at the right moments, but still, the storyline underscores ongoing Native family battles with law enforcement to investigate their loved ones’ disappearance.
University of Montana graduate-to-be Shadie Wallette, Northern Cheyenne, plays disappeared Star to Allison Hick’s Mother. Wallette is not yet an Actors’ Equity Association union member, but she performed well alongside professionals.
Wallette describes the overarching emotion of the play as “longing or yearning.”
They performed in the stage reading a few years ago, so she’s had time to learn and expand her character before she heads to the world of the Chicago theater after graduation.
The systemic failure of law enforcement holds forth as a common theme, as does the well-intentioned, but misguided safe house for survivors, in the play.
“We have to support one another,” said Heavy Runner. “That’s the importance of this play. That’s what it means to me.”
As the media increasingly covers Indigenous families telling their own stories of agonizing searches, Heavy Runner foresees Can’t Drink Salt Water playing in other, larger spaces.
“I hope with the director and (some) actors being from New York, why not take this play to New York,” said Heavy Runner. “How amazing would that be?”