Grieving family of Iñupiaq woman and MMIP issues are at the center of a new play

When a family’s relative goes missing or has been killed, their struggles include grief, attempts to protect one another, battles with bureaucracy and a lack of support.

Those experiences are the focus of a new play written by Emmy-nominated Iñupiaq playwright Cathy Tagnak Rexford, who is from Anchorage and has roots in Kaktovik and Utqiaġvik. “Cold Case” premiered earlier this month in Juneau and is coming to Anchorage in October.

In the play, a young woman in rural Alaska struggles to recover the body of her aunt from an Anchorage morgue — a devastating scenario that reflects the crisis of missing and murdered people in Indigenous communities, “in the Iñupiaq region, in the state of Alaska, in the United States,” Rexford said.

The play is “also about the ways in which we communicate and miscommunicate, the layers of technology, of language — of traditional language and English — all the modes that we have access to at our fingertips, and often how that plethora of access to people, and people having access to us, isn’t always helpful, it isn’t always positive,” said Rexford, who shares a 2024 Primetime Emmy nomination for her work on “True Detective: Night Country.” “It certainly is a kind of a cycle of hope and despair and hope and bashed hope.”

The play — which won the 2022 National Theatre Conference Barry and Bernice Stavis Playwright’s Award and topped the New York Times list of plays to see this fall — debuted on stage earlier this month at Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, where it’s showing through Sept. 22. The play’s Anchorage run extends from Oct. 11 to 20.

The action of the play takes place at a home in rural Alaska, where a young woman, Joanna, and her grandmother Aaka Mary are trapped during a blizzard, said director DeLanna Studi, who is also a current artistic director of Native voices at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.

“It’s a family story at the heart,” Studi said. “How does tragedy affect us? How does it live in our bodies? And how does it affect our relationships with each other? ... There is a person missing, and we are powerless to find her, we are powerless when we do find her. What does that do to a family?”

While searching for information about what happened to her aunt, Joanna is also trying to keep her elderly grandmother from learning that painful truth, a plot turn that raises questions about whether it is more helpful to tell or withhold the truth and how we can protect the people we love without hurting them more, Studi said.

Aaka Mary is played by Nutaaq Doreen Simmonds, an Utqiaġvik resident who recently retired as an Inupiat language teacher and started acting in TV productions, including “True Detective: Night Country.”

“This is her very first play,” Studi said. “It’s so inspiring to see an elder who’s always wanted to do this but wasn’t really given the opportunity, and now they’re owning this stage.”

Another Utqiaġvik educator, Pausauraq Jana Harcharek, worked as a cultural and Iñupiaq language consultant for “Cold Case,” and makes a cameo in the play as well.

Part of “Cold Case” depicts Joanna on the phone, trying to reach out for help retrieving her aunt. Joanna struggles to move through the automated system, as well as through people on the line who don’t offer any solutions, Studi said.

“Everyone has been in that situation,” Studi said. “You just would do anything to connect with a real person, and then when you finally do, the personal aspect has gone out of it.”

The stage is framed by multiple projectable surfaces, and while the audience watches Joanna, they also see the text and Facebook messages she receives, hear her phone conversations and hear her being put on hold countless times, Studi said.

“This whole play would have been over in, like, the first five minutes if one of those people on the phone would have just cared a little bit,” Studi said. “No one wants to go out of the way to help someone they don’t know, and that’s not a tribal value.”

Studi, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said that the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous people is ever-present in her hometown in Oklahoma. She said that if a non-Native person attacks a tribal member in her town, the tribe doesn’t have jurisdiction to prosecute them.

“It makes it safer for me to not be on my own lands,” she said.

Studi said that whenever she enters an establishment, she pays close attention to the exit locations and the people in the room — whether there are more men than women, and whether there are other people of color present.

“We’re taught to always be looking over our shoulder because we know we have a target on our backs,” Studi said.

While her father was still alive, she spoke with him as she worked on “Cold Case” and other MMIW-related projects. That was when her father told her for the first time that her aunt was a missing and murdered Indigenous woman. Studi was 10 when her aunt disappeared and didn’t know what happened to her.

“It took me doing the work and telling him about the plays I was writing, the plays I was going to be directing, for him to share that family story,” Studi said.

Rexford, who grew up in Alaska, said she has relatives who have gone missing or were murdered. She said such losses are devastating on an individual level and on a community scale.

“I struggle with how to grieve and how to heal those wounds,” she said. “As a Native woman, I think about it every day: I think about how in one instant, being at the wrong place at the wrong time could be the difference between me being safe and at home and me being part of a statistic.”

Rexford said she hopes that people who watch the play are moved to understand that the statistics are human beings.

“For each missing and murdered Indigenous relative, a missing person, there is a story like this. It needs to live beyond the families. It needs to live in our collective consciousness, our collective lives if that makes sense. It’s too much for families alone to hold,” she said. “On a basic human level, this is a reflection of so many other layers of humanity in our country, you know — it’s related to violence against women in particular; it is related to violence against the land, against the waters, against our animals and all life, really.”