¡Indian Territory!

Abstract

This chapter examines Cherokee dramatist Rollie Lynn Riggs’ Mexico plays, in which he imagines the dramatic geographies of the many Indian territories of the United States and Mexico. These geographies are so historically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually similar that they appear interchangeable: the Cherokee Nation is Indian Territory; Indian Territory is indigenous Mexico; and indigenous Mexico is Indian Territory and the Cherokee Nation. Riggs produces a Great Indian Territory or Greater Indigenous Mexico, though only a consideration of his entire corpus makes this intertribal and indigenous transnational space legible.