Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the CD  Soul Sand; used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

 Jo Reed: For the National Endowment for the Arts this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed.

Randy Reinholz: The aesthetic is reciprocity. If I bring something to the conversation, it’s to share with you. So that’s the reciprocity that marks native theater. The story is alive. It grows. It’s not static, and it will always have some kind of generosity, even if it’s difficult or a tragedy.

Jo Reed: Today, we’re marking the end of Indigenous Peoples Month by revisiting my 2018 interview with Randy Reinholz, he is the producing artistic director and co-creator of Native Voices at the Autry, a Los Angeles theater company begun almost 30 years ago that produces new work by Indigenous playwrights. 

Native Voices not only puts on equity productions of native work—it also nurtures new and emerging talent, providing workshops and retreats for writers and actors, creating staged readings for new work, and providing a platform established playwrights as well. Randy Reinholz who is a member of the Choctaw nation is at the center of all of it … he started his career as an actor and has moved into directing with over seventy-five productions in the United States, Australia and Canada; he’s also playwright whose play Off the Rails—an adaptation of Shakespeare’s measure for measure set in Buffalo Bill's Wild West was produced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. With Randy as producing artistic director Native Voices at the Autry has produced 32 plays, including 19 world premieres; 13 Playwrights Retreats; 22 New Play Festivals; 6 Short Play Festivals and more than 200 workshops and public staged readings. Just as significantly, it is deeply respected in both the Native American and theatre communities for its innovative artistry which highlights the unique points of view within the more than 500 Native American nations in North America. Like many successful programs, Native Voices was created to address an absence—not of talent but of opportunity.

Randy Reinholz: It was 1993. I’d just joined the faculty at Illinois State University, and my wife was also on faculty, Jean Bruce Scott, who is the cofounder of Native Voices. And essentially we were looking for a play that we might be able to produce there at Illinois State. It was kind of a homogeneous, mid-western state school, not very diverse, and the question came up, could we find a script that could reflect my culture. I’m an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Could we find that script, and then what would it look like if our students performed it? I didn’t know of any scripts, but I did know a lot of people in play development, so we started looking at those folks, started calling, seeing who knew what, and nobody really knew any more than I did, which was a little surprising. And one thing led to another. We found some folks. We worked through Native Earth in Toronto, a Canadian company, and then IAIA, Institute of American Indian Arts, and from there we brought some of those playwrights to campus at Illinois State in 1994. They started talking to each other quickly. We had panel discussions and so forth. We read their plays and they were really grateful to have their plays read out loud. One of the things that came up over and over again is in the United States, people hadn’t invited more than one native playwright to anything. And so to get to see each other’s work and start to think about how other people were approaching some of these topics of colonization was really, really good. They were excited. We did have a script that was filled with multicultural characters and one native character, and that’s called Now Look What You Made Me Do by Marie Clements--Marie has gone on to win the Governor General’s Award several times in Canada--and we produced that play the following year. The playwrights were so excited about being able to see each other’s work that we invited another cohort in. So the first year we had five. The second year we produced a play and brought in four more plays to read, and that became Native Voices.

Jo Reed: Well, obviously it’s so important to be able to have the voices and talent of Native American playwrights out there. One would think that you would want many of those parts to be in fact portrayed by Native American actors, so you can't just do one piece of the puzzle.

Randy Reinholz: There you go. That’s exactly right, and we were just looking for a play to produce at a university. Often the universities, we produce plays-- I’m still a professor. I’m at San Diego State now. We often produce plays where the actors aren’t quite age appropriate. Sometimes they’re not ethnic appropriate. But as we move into professional theater, of course we do want those things. And I think the other thing that’s part of that, when there aren’t people in the room who know native culture, so much of the rehearsal time is spent on Indian 101, just ideas, you know, basic ideas about how tribal enrollment works, what are issues on reservations, what are the federal programs, what are the basic history. People in the United States up until very recently were given misinformation about Native American history, and that’s I suspect because we’re very uncomfortable with the stolen lands and the broken treaties.

Jo Reed: Did you find that you really had to spread your wings and make it much more inclusive?

Randy Reinholz: Absolutely. And I got a new job, like I said, here at San Diego State, and we had been consulting with The Autry in Los Angeles about their programming and their institution, which they wanted to become more multicultural, and they’ve been incredibly successful.

Jo Reed: And that’s the Autry Museum of the American West.

Randy Reinholz: There we go. Right, right, they’re in Griffith Park. And as we started to talk, we were consulting on one of their major exhibitions called Powerful Images, the plan was it would start at The Autry and then a number of museums that focus on western culture, would take this exhibition. They asked our opinion about does it portray contemporary native people enough? The vision was powerful images of Native American people through American history. And, you know, the overwhelming criticism was it’s just too historicized if it constantly looks at native people in the past, and this is a surprising thing the research revealed. People who attended Western Heritage Museums believed by the factor of 85 percent that Native Americans were extinct, and that was really surprising, that what our informed audience should’ve been thinking. And so we really thought it was imperative, then, to have contemporary stories and contemporary images. If we only had images, it’s fed into that, even if they were contemporary. So a play a play became a way to put native people with native stories in front of an audience on a regular basis. And it was a good strategy, and that led to Native Voices at The Autry, and we’ve been there for 20 years.

Jo Reed: Before we get into some of the specific theater programs that are created and run by Native Voices — let’s hear an excerpt from a production. This is actor Román Zaragoza in They Don”t Talk Back which was written by Tlingit playwright Frank Henry Kaash Katasse and directed by Randy Reinholz…

Film excerpt

Jo Reed: That was an excerpt from the Native Voices production They Don’t Talk Back… I know being an equity company is very important to Native Voices— Randy Reinholz explains why.

Randy Reinholz: My wife and I, Jean Bruce Scott, who founded the company, we started off as actors. We believed actors should be paid. Los Angeles is an interesting town. It’s a feast or famine place for a lot of actors. And so we thought we would work with the union to pay the actors a living wage. There’s a lot of people who pay actors in Los Angeles $20, $30 a performance and little to nothing for the rehearsal, so we really wanted to compensate the actors. The second piece of that was many of the actors would be Native Americans, people who didn’t often get a chance to play leads in plays at all, much less in film, so we thought that that would be equitable. So we’ve been on those equity contracts since 2001, so really proud of that. And, then, as you build a theater company and the actors are paid a working wage, you pretty much have to pay everybody in the room something. Again, a lot of theater in Los Angeles trades on good will, and we thought, well, everybody at least deserves minimum wage. And now we’re to the point where all the creative team gets paid the working wage, whatever the union representation is, whether it’s stage directors and choreographers or United Scenic Artists and so forth.

Jo Reed: And you also do, I have to say, something very near to my heart, which are free stage readings, which as a theatergoer is one of the things I just love.

Randy Reinholz: Thank you. I’m glad that you enjoy that. That makes up a big part of our audience. A lot of people are interested in what’s next or what might be on the margins that’s not quite capable of these productions that cost upwards of a million dollars. So the staged reading is a chance for the actors to show the playwright what the play sounds like, and to some extent, there’s some limited staging so we can see if tricky costume changes and so forth, do we have time for those sorts of things. They tend to take place in front of a music stand with very, very minimal staging, the actors have script in hand, and it really turns into an evening of the imagination, so the audience’s imagination really is deeply engaged. So we do those standalone readings. We do playwright’s retreats. I think we’ve done 15 radio plays through the years. We tour work. We work with youth groups. We have a special curriculum to go in to work in community. Often what’s really fun is when we have very established actors who always come back to Native Voices because they want to give back and they want to give particularly to native communities. And so they’ll go out to community and we’ll work with these young, usually junior high kids. They get so excited when they realize, “Oh, my gosh, my mentor from my play is from blah, blah movie or blah, blah television series.” So that makes it real, and a lot of native youth haven’t had people to look up to in the media. There’s been maybe one, two, three, and now you’re starting to see a lot of people making it in the media, in mainstream media, they’re mostly playing native roles, but sometimes they actually are playing things that aren’t ethnic specific, and it’s just because they’re talented actors.

Jo Reed: And the Festival of New Plays is a really important cornerstone.

Randy Reinholz: Correct. What we noticed early is that sometime-- most of the scripts that we receive-- we evaluate scripts once or twice a year. We have an open call. Everything’s on the web, Native Voices at The Autry. We have these calls, and a lot of times people would send us a script--and they’d been working on it two, four, five years--they were so close to it that it was really difficult for them to make any kinds of changes. And of course what happens when developing theater, there’s the thing I think I’ve written when I’m in my room reading it to myself, and then when other people read it back to me you hear so much. And, of course, the big thing, are there questions. What questions do the other artists ask, and that becomes really crucial. And of course, that’s the great story feedback that all writers need, and that’s what the retreat gives us, is a little bit of time. We read the script early. We have this company of actors. Usually we have 30 to 40 actors involved with this process. They’ve been involved-- I think we’re 25 years into this, yes, so they’ve done this kind of work a lot. Often they’ve seen the playwright’s work in other places, sometimes at Native Voices. Sometimes they have a relationship, so that becomes really integral artmaking, and I think it’s the way theater has been made for a long time, and we’re really grateful to be able to do that. It gives us about a week to be together, ask questions. The writers are not from Los Angeles, so there’s also a little camaraderie or community that starts to build. We make sure we have a number of community meals and so forth. We always have representatives from the local tribal government, so Gabrielino-Tongva is the land, the traditional lands of where The Autry sits, so we often start off with blessings and recognition of the land, and then really great conversations about, “Well, where are you from?” “How do you do this?” “How do your people--” “Really? We do-- we don’t do it like that. We do it like this.”

Jo Reed: You’ve been doing this for a generation, which is extraordinary, so I wonder if there were issues that native writers perhaps were focusing on when you first began and what they were, and whether you’ve seen a shift over time.

Randy Reinholz: Sure. We really do feel that we kind of have an insight into what are the issues in Indian country. Often when a group gets their voice back, the conversation is about oppression, what that feels like, all the forms it takes. That was with the early days in the early plays that we looked at. Then it was about oppression and how abuse was central to that, whether it was being abused, having been abused, learning to become an abuser, and then all the forms abuse takes: alcohol, sex, drugs, and so forth, violence. Then as tribal gaming comes into play, the question of, well, who’s really native and what does it mean? And, of course, the big insult you can throw at someone when you’re in a community of color is to say, “But you’re not really,” and then fill in the thing that we all say we are, and we pick someone out to beat them up for not being that. So that becomes a question of who’s what. A question we’re seeing right now, there’s tremendous violence against native women that’s rampant in the country. Native women, four out of five experience sexual violence. A native woman is 10 times more likely to be murdered than the regular population. The suicide rate in communities waffles between five times the national average up to ten times the national average. What’s causing that, and how do we start to pull apart this epidemic of murdered and missing women? How do we start writing plays that start to hold the law enforcement agencies accountable? The population that’s most likely to be killed by a law enforcement officer is a native person. So bringing those kinds of issues to the floor are part of the plots of the different stories we’re looking at. That’s a big deal right now.

Jo Reed: And let me just ask you, what’s the gender balance like with the participants in Native Voices?

Randy Reinholz: We probably have a few more women than men as actors. We’ve been pretty balanced in the number of plays we’ve produced. We tend to produce plays by women as often as by men, which is not in line with the professional theater. The professional theater has not been particularly good at that historically. We have gender balance both by playwrights, directors, and actors and also the rest of the creative staff becomes important. And we’ve also become a center for people particularly here in the southwest but on the west coast not only for casting, which makes a lot of sense that people would come to us, particularly large resourced institutions looking for casting, but people are asking us about, “Hey, we have an entry level position for a stage manager,” you know, that sort of thing, and so people are proactively seeking our talent out to engage them to round out the whole field.

Jo Reed: Of course, that allows, as you mentioned earlier, Native American kids who can then look and say, “Oh, it’s possible to have a career in theater.”

Randy Reinholz: Absolutely. And we don’t get out into community as much as we like because it’s really expensive, and native communities don’t have a lot of resources to host us, so that is something we’ve been looking at. You know, how do we rebalance? Ever since the Great Recession that’s been a real problem. But we do bring youth in, and last year I had a play called Off the Rails, which was at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and it’s an adaptation of a Shakespeare, Measure for Measure. But it’s set in the old west, the 1880s, and the backdrop is the American Indian boarding school system, which is a very difficult piece of American history that a lot of Americans don’t know. But since it was set against the boarding school, it has a lot of youthful characters in it. We knew a lot of students would come see the play. And I think a lot of young people-- they saw themselves in those characters. It was a really interesting way for young people to view Shakespeare and the old west. And we did get a lot of native kids to the show. But, of course, the kids, what they recognized, the native kids, were the dances. One of the characters is written so that it’s always played by a culture bearer from the region, and so that character, informs the end of the play with dances that are recognizable to people from the region. And so when those young native kids saw all those dances on stage, some of them would hop up and dance at the seat. Bill Rouche, the director, he’s so smart. He just invites the audience to come on stage. And the kids would rush down to be part of that dance, because they were taking stage in a power arena, and their culture was being celebrated.

Jo Reed: There are so many ways I want to go with this, but let me just ask you this first. Is there an aesthetic, do you think, that’s distinctly native that’s being brought on the stage through the work that you’re doing at Native Voices?

Randy Reinholz: The aesthetic is reciprocity. If I bring something to the conversation, it’s to share with you. And then as I share that story, you start to share your story, which all the sudden causes Collin over here behind the desk to say, “Huh, that reminds me of my story,” and then he tells his story. And after I’ve heard those stories, I understand my story in a deeper, more meaningful way that I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t shared it with you in the beginning. So that’s the reciprocity that marks native theater. The story is alive. It grows. It’s not static, and it will always have some kind of generosity, even if it’s difficult or a tragedy.

Jo Reed: And do you see the plays over the years kind of in dialog with each other, in conversation with each other?

Randy Reinholz: Absolutely. To some extent, having a stage, a dedicated stage, a time of year when these stories happen and a place, has been super empowering. And of course what’s happened is, is it sort of exploded in a very good way, native theater that is. So like last year we had three plays in major venues by native women at the same time, whereas five years before you wouldn’t have had a show by a native woman in a major venue the entire year. So people want these stories. It’s not to commercial theater yet. I would like to see a native play on Broadway, but I’m not saying I think there’s gonna be one next week. But rather I think the major not-for-profit theater companies are starting to realize if they’re in dialog, not only do native communities want to see native plays, but theatergoers want to see native plays. I think theatergoers have an appetite for the country where we live, and we want to see all of these important ideas on stage, not only the entertainment or the great craft.

Jo Reed: I want to get back to The Autry for just one second. Do you work with the curatorial staff at all at The Autry so that the plays and the exhibits, there can be a kind of symmetry?

Randy Reinholz: Yeah, they’re in dialogue, absolutely. As you said, the plays are in dialogue with each other, and whether we plan it or not, our patrons come see our plays. And if things go well, they’re curious and want to go inside the building, the museum. There are lot of rotating exhibitions. And about 12 years ago I guess now, The Autry merged with the Southwest Museum, which was the first museum in Los Angeles. I think there are 300,000 or 400,000 Native American objects in the Southwest collection that has been merged together and preserved with The Autry collection. And then the ARC is about to open, which is the Autry Research which will be a really large facility in some ways based on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indians’ Maryland Complex. So you can go arrange a trip out to Maryland, and you can look at specific objects based on geography or time. And you have to be a researcher and you have to be pretty clear about what you want. One time I was doing a play there, so they offered this to me, so I was shocked when I went out there. My favorite story from that memory is, is when I went there they said, “Well, there’s a room to pray if you want to pray before you see the objects, and of course you might need it after you leave.” And I thought, pray, huh? Well, that’s really thoughtful. “I won't need that. I really appreciate you. Thank you.” So then I get in there. I get on the Genie lift. I pull out the drawer, and I start looking at these objects, and I realize I’m crying, and I can't control myself. And I was shocked. Like, I’m just not this kind of person. It doesn’t happen very often. And I was like, I’d better lower the Genie lift and go find that prayer room <laughs> and calm down.

Jo Reed: Wow.

Randy Reinholz: So it’s amazing that when people with these backgrounds connect with things from their culture, often objects that were taken -- many objects in museums were intended to be grave, burial, funeral objects. And of course, The Autry is incredibly vigorous about NAGPRA and repatriation and holding onto objects and preserving them until the culture bearers for the places that they belong are in a position to make sure that they’re gonna last for generations. And it’s a fascinating piece of American history to be part of. So, yes, we are involved with curatorial and we do hear these conversations. We often are thinking about how does the play we’re planning on doing next connect with things?

Jo Reed: Funding is never easy, and I know you’ve gotten grants over the years from a number of organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts.

Randy Reinholz: Yeah, I mean because you and I are talking, it’s gonna sound like I’m sucking up to you. It was super important that we were recognized by the NEA because in the field of theater when we started presenting plays by Native Americans, the professional theater really treated us as if we were cute children in that of course they should be applauded for what they’re doing, but it’s not real theater because we do real theater and none of them are ever in our theaters. That’s a hard Catch-22 to overcome. Again, that was why we started working with union contracts, so we could get working professionals that the professional theater companies recognized working with us, and then they could go out in the community and talk about our professionalism. It was because of the funding of the NEA that we could make those bold choices and commitments. And, again, in Los Angeles, when we said we’re paying a working wage based on union minimums, they were shocked, because many of the people who denigrated our work weren’t paying people. And the NEA gave us the faith to say we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do it for a period of time -- it’s the backbone. It’s the gold standard in American art, particularly for startup companies. We’d only been I think producing five years when we first got our first NEA grant. Well, then the city and the county came on. Well, then we had the NEA, the city, the county, and then corporate funders started to come on, and then in the Great Recession, we started having individual donors come on. And of course, that’s the mix that any not-for-profit needs to be sustainable. And the NEA has been through there for us the whole time. Sometimes the NEA had more capacity than others and sometimes maybe our work merited it more than others, but it was exciting to say that we are funded by the NEA. And then because we were funded by the NEA, I started being invited to serve on NEA panels, and then from serving on NEA panels, I started serving on panels for granting organizations all over the country, which has helped keep native voices aware of best practices, to be deeply involved in community, to bring the best artistic practices they can to those projects, and then to make art that is breathtaking. It’s not just, “oh, it’s good because of those poor people getting a chance to do something.” It actually ends up being the innovative art that changes the way things get done.

Jo Reed: You have supported a generation, which is-- congratulations.

Randy Reinholz: Thank you.

Jo Reed: That is a wonderful thing. What has surprised you doing this work?

Randy Reinholz: I guess, you know, I had faith that the talent was there. I had faith that the talent would be deep and important beyond just the culture. And watching these artists whose personas and whose work is grounded in these ancient ways of working find ways to adapt to become innovators in the field, I think that’s the thing that’s the most exciting. I think we’ve often thought that the way people succeed is to make compromises, and I think what happens is real culture that’s important actually informs what the emerging culture of the country wants to be. And, of course, we’re at this crossroads of, what will our culture be as a country? And it’s great to see that people who have had resiliency for hundreds and hundreds of years are actually being looked to to model what are some next steps. That’s exciting.

Jo Reed: And what do you want to see for the generation to come?

Randy Reinholz: We’re always thinking about the past and what needs to happen next. One of our goals is to have a very successful succession process. So my wife and I are cofounders. Next year is the 25th anniversary, and we’re hoping to announce the new leadership of Native Voices as that season rolls out. I’m not quite sure when and how that’s gonna happen, but we are starting to engage in conversations with people. So looking for that succession, looking to have this next generation of artists define what they want the role of the senior elders in the process to be, like myself. So looking for that next generation to take over the leadership, the visioning, building on what’s worked in the past but also defining what really needs to happen next, that’s what’s exciting. That’s what I want to continue to see. I want to see these artists that are going off and working in these professional venues and being paid well to keep coming back to Native Voices to find ways to plug in and give back to this company of artists, the new generation of artists, and that’s been happening. I want to see that happen more.

Jo Reed: Fair enough. Well, Randy, thank you. Thank you for giving me your time, and thank you for your extraordinary work. 

Randy Reinholz: And thank you for bringing the attention of the NEA to people across the country. It’s so vital, this work, and I know it’s not a lot of money in the world of billionaires, but it’s so crucial because the process is so rigorous. But year in and year out, the NEA has picked a lot of winners, and that’s exciting to be part of that legacy.

Jo Reed: Yes, indeed. It is on this end, too. Thank you.

That was my 2018 interview Randy Reinholz—he’s Producing Artistic Director and co-creator of Native Voices at the Autry. We’ll have a link to Native Voices in our show notes. 

You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. You can subscribe to Art Works where ever you get your podcasts. So please do and leave us a rating on Apple—it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the CD  Soul Sand; used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, This is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed. As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday, it seemed like a good time to look at some of work being done around food culture-- a growing field in the academy and in folk and traditional arts. So I turned to Dr. Zella Palmer—she’s the director and chair of Dillard University’s Ray Charles program in African American Material Culture where she also created its food studies program.  She’s also the author of two cookbooks “Recipes and Remembrance of Fair Dillard, 1869-2019,” a cookbook that’s like a food memoir….. presenting recipes that also offers a culinary history of New Orleans and Dillard’s place in that history. She took that same wholistic approach when she co-authored “Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque” which celebrates the history, tradition, and recipes of barbeque from the famous North Carolina pitmaster. Zella Palmer is the director of the documentary “The Story of New Orleans Creole Cooking: The Black Hand in the Pot” and host of the podcast “Culture and Flavor.”   Her work has been recognized by the Louisiana Creole Research Association who in 2020 presented Palmer with the Founders Award for her research and preservation of Black material culture, and Dine Diaspora honored her as a 2022 Black Woman in Food Trailblazer.  I spoke with Dr. Zella Palmer earlier this month and began by asking her to give me some background about Dillard University’s Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture. 

Zella Palmer: Right before Katrina, Ray Charles was given an honorary degree by Dillard University. There's a funny story behind how the Ray Charles Program came about. One of my former colleagues, Mark Barnes, was givi ng Ray Charles a ride around town, being the host for the celebration of him receiving this honorary degree and he said, “Mr. Charles, you know, could we stop and just get a quick bite to eat? There's McDonald's…” and he was just mentioning all these fast food restaurants to stop at and Mr. Charles said, "Boy, I'm in New Orleans. Why would I want fast food?" And so the conversation started, and he started really thinking about how he wanted to leave this endowment to Dillard University to put together a program that would talk about food and thinking about his mother and his grandmother, who were sharecroppers, and just also his foresight that so many of our young people are living in a fast food generation, as well as a microwave generation and he wanted them to learn more about Black food culture and so Dr. Lomax, who was then the president of Dillard University, who is now the president of the United Negro College Fund, had a broader conversation with Mr. Charles about making the program an African American material culture program. So the program began. Dr. Jessica Harris was the first chair of some of your listeners might be familiar with her landmark book, High on the Hog and then I came along about almost 10 years ago and we have done incredible work that I'm very proud of and we, you know, look towards our model of what Dr. Rochelle Ford, our current president, our new president, calls a communiversity and that is what Dillard University stands for since 1869. So, to have this program

here in New Orleans, a food capital,  is profound. 

Jo Reed: Well, exactly. When we say material culture, it is a broad term and for people who are unfamiliar, can you talk a little bit about what that encompasses?

Zella Palmer: Sure. A material culture is the evidence of a culture. That, I mean, when we talk about music, when we talk about African American music, art, food, language, and even just considering a city like New Orleans, our street culture, our second line culture, jazz, that is material culture, the materialization of a culture. 

Jo Reed: Well, as you mentioned, food was extremely important to Ray Charles, and he understood it as a cultural experience, its taste and history and when we talk about Dillard, I think we also have to talk about Dillard's own history with food culture and in fact, you wrote a cookbook called “Recipes and Remembrance of Fair Dillard.” So tell me about the history of food at Dillard University.

Zella Palmer: Absolutely. Thank you for mentioning the book, “Recipes and Remembrance of Fair Dillard”. It was an interesting moment. You know, I love our librarians. Any, you know, any librarians out there, I just love you all to death, because you carry so many treasures. At the time, John Kennedy, who was our archivist, and Malik Bartholomew, who was our current archivist, said, ”Zella, you know, we have these cookbooks that have been sitting in our library for decades. And I think you might want to do something with them.” I looked at the cookbooks, and they're from the 1950s. This is when President Dent who was then the president of Dillard University and Jesse Covington Dent, his lovely wife, and she was a classic pianist who went to Juilliard.  This was before there was financial aid. This is before there were scholarships. So they had to figure out innovative ways to raise money for students and one of the ways that they did that was publishing a cookbook with the Dillard Women's Club. And this cookbook is a treasure trove. I mean, Jesse Covington Dent collected so many recipes from around the world and it just talks about the power of HBCUs and how it is truly diverse. One of the recipes was from Eleanor Roosevelt, a huckleberry dessert. Another recipe was from Lena Horne. Her chicken recipe, our East Indian chicken recipe, Ralph Bunch. I mean, whoever were the greats of the time were included in this cookbook and to be able to tell that story, again, was pretty profound for me as a historian, as well as just wanting to lift up the legacy, the culinary legacy of Dillard University in this pivotal and landmark of the city of New Orleans, which has a very unique sense of hospitality.

Jo Reed: And I also learned, and of course it makes perfect sense, that during Jim Crow, for example, Dillard and other HBCUs actually became a gathering place for Black folks outside of the university community, outside of students and teachers, where they would gather and dine together.

Zella Palmer: Absolutely. We have to remember: the period of the cookbook that I wrote about under the Dent administration was during segregation. So in the cookbook that we reprinted, it tells a lot about what was happening during the Jim Crow era and how HBCUs were safe spaces where you can dress up and dine on some of the finest Creole cuisine that the city had to offer because we weren't allowed to eat in white establishments or white restaurants. We weren't allowed to even sometimes go past Canal Street without a pass or having proof that you work uptown New Orleans. So to have functions at Dillard University or to have functions in African-Americans' family homes, they created these kind of restaurant spaces.

Jo Reed: Well, in your program, in the Ray Charles program at Dillard, you're giving students a holistic understanding of foodways. Tell me how you go about doing that.

Zella Palmer: Sure. So before the pandemic, we decided that we wanted to launch a food studies minor. And within that food studies minor, we offered six courses based on what we're seeing in the industry right now and the need for professionals in those environments. So food media: we need more Black journalists. We need more diverse journalists, right? We also, not only journalists, but food stylists. Having regional or indigenous folks as food stylists can really help tell the story of what gumbo looks like.  And we need more food stylists. We need more food policymakers. When we look at just who decides on what grocery stores are put into our neighborhoods, who decides what food is available to us.  We need policymakers, not only on the national level, but on the international level. We also need more food historians. So we open our program to our students who are filmmakers, who are interested in becoming journalists, who are interested also in becoming chefs. You know, we do our best to put our students in places and internships that will help them grow and understand that food is a tool and resource that can open up an entire new world to them and through that, we're able to teach about material culture. We're able to teach about history.  We can make a batch of pralines with them and we can talk about the history of sugar, the history of pecans, the history of Black women who also made those pralines and were selling during slavery. So we are super excited for this food studies minor and we are definitely one of the only HBCUs that has a food studies minor and we're hoping to grow that to become an eventual food studies major.

Jo Reed:  You're going and you're exploring this rich tapestry of African American food history, you know, with the focus on New Orleans, but not exclusively. But how do you even begin to your research into this?

Zella Palmer: Well, like I said, we have some great professors. When I think about some of our professors-- John Pult, he's a jazz historian, and he teaches food and media and food and literature. So we look at our lesson plan, our curriculum and start from the beginning as much as we possibly can. We're not just looking only at African American culinary history, but we're looking at Native American culinary history. We're looking at global policy. We're looking at inviting different chefs, like Ana Castro, who is a James Beard nominated chef, or Serena Bay, who is a Senegalese chef here in New Orleans, to bring them into our classroom. So we can not only break bread with them, but also learn about their culture and learn about their stories, learn how food was migrated from different parts of the world to our table.

Jo Reed: Food is not just about taste, but it really encompasses all our senses and I wonder how you think the sensory experience of food, its presentation, its smell, its texture, plays a role in cultural memory and history?

Zella Palmer: Absolutely. And it definitely does. One of our final projects is for our students that go and ask one of the eldest members of your family, sit down with them and have a conversation about what their food memories are and we have on our YouTube channel, I love this interview of one of our former students, and she's sitting down with her grandmother, who remembers her parents migrating west and they moved to Oklahoma. And she was living in Indian territory. Her parents didn't have running water or electricity, but they grew all the food on their farms and just all of the memories that she has of that… and I know what that means for students when they get to sit down and talk to their elders, whether that's in their family or in the community, where they can actually compare their own food memories with those of their elders. So it's a huge aha-moment for our students to really start thinking outside of the box and realizing how food is integral to every part of our life.

Jo Reed: What drew you to African American material culture in the first place?

Zella Palmer: My parents, definitely my parents. I lost my parents in the past three years. And they exposed a whole beautiful world to me. And my dad used to say, “I collect people and make them part of my game.”  My mother was incredible. She was a former professor, former senator in Chicago, and our house was hub of activism, of thoughts, of people from all over the world. So my dinner table growing up, I was exposed to all kinds of cuisine and you grow up in a place like Chicago that is super diverse, you also get to experience all types of people. And sometimes they marry in your family, sometimes they're telling you their stories or sharing food and recipes with you. But within that was also that I'm the child of the Great Migration and so I do believe that I was also meant to come back to the South. My mother's side of the family is from North Carolina and my father's side is from New Orleans and so when I understood and they sat down and told me their stories of their parents and grandparents, then and the reasoning behind why we eat certain things, why my mother loved oyster stew so much, why my dad loved gumbo so much, then I understand where I come from.

Jo Reed: You created the food studies program at Dillard. It’s still such a new field. How did you develop it? What was your thinking behind it?

Zella Palmer:  You know, it's interesting because my mother was a professor at Northwestern University,  way long time ago and I just remember  how she was the Dean of English and she ran the Black House at Northwestern University in Chicago. And it was this vibrant place where there was always thought and food and conversation.  I remember that as a child and I wanted to create something like that. And my love for museum studies, my love for history, I wanted to figure out how I could create a program that would encompass that, encompass Ray Charles' vision, encompass the rich history of Dillard University and New Orleans, because Black New Orleans culture is so beautiful, so rich and has such a long history. I wanted to make sure that we uplift that, but also inviting all of our students from all over the world and right here from the South, from Louisiana… I wanted them to feel like they were also home, whether they were from urban cities or rural communities, and they would be able to share their stories. So I began looking at other programs. Obviously, NYU has a food studies program, Boston University, and other universities have food studies programs, but my focus was centered on Black and Indigenous food ways and that's a really broad term not only is it African American, but it's also from Grenada, Cuba, Senegal, Nigeria, it's also from Oklahoma, it's from Brazil. So it encompasses this global plate that we all share and it's these global stories of people who love food and love family and love just sitting at the table and having a beautiful meal with each other that possibly was made by people who, you know, cultivated the land and so that's where my grounding came from and Dillard has been such an amazing support for making sure that we build this program brick by brick and we're just beginning.

Jo Reed: Well, as you said, New Orleans is a city with such a rich culinary and cultural history, but it's also a history that continues to be unearthed and more lights are shining on corners that were not lit before, because central contributions of Black people, of Indigenous people often could be ignored, especially when it came to food.

Zella Palmer: Absolutely. And we see this time and time again.  I remember when my students and I filmed “The Story of New Orleans Creole Cooking: The Black Hand in the Pot,” looking through archival footage, we found a 1960s footage of a second line and what was fascinating was the food trucks that were at the second line, which were in one of the projects. All of the food that they were selling to those who were participating in the second line were vegetables and so then fast forward, and you look today, it's completely changed.  And how did that happen? Street food vendors had access to farms in rural Louisiana, or grew their own vegetables, or had small plots in front of their homes. And the community had an abundance of vegetables on their plate, it was part of culture and society. But then you fast forward 20, 25 years later and vegetables are almost completely removed from the table. So that's how we kind of look at it, and just bringing, unearthing these histories and just bringing them back to the community and back to the people, so we can have these conversations, and figure out how we can also bring this back to our students. I think about one of our students, La'Carrie, who is a nursing student. I hope she won't mind that I mentioned her, but I just love her so much. She's from rural Louisiana, and her grandparents have a farm. And we have students who are sometimes first-generation students from rural environments. And she sometimes carried shame for growing up on a farm, but when she learns the history of Black land ownership, and the history of Black farmers in the U.S., it's a tremendous pride that comes from learning all of this. And then her wanting to grow vegetables? ”Let me change my diet. I'm a nursing student. What can I do when I become a nurse to make sure that my patients are getting access to healthy food?”  It's a seed that we're planting to be better citizens, and to be better consumers. 

Jo Reed: The other thing you really tackle in your film, as the title suggests, “The History of Creole New Orleans Cooking”, and you state the obvious in that film, which is Black people were the ones doing the cooking. Ergo, they created Creole cooking.

Zella Palmer: Do you think? And it wasn't unknown in the 19th century, 18th, 19th century, when you look at some of the early American cookbooks, when you look at the “Times-Picayune Creole Cookbook” or “Creole Cookery”, you know, other cookbooks that in other parts of the South and Virginia, they plainly state we gathered these recipes from the lips of our Tantes or our Mammies.  So back then they weren't suppressing that information, but for some reason we still struggle with that history, that yes it was majority Black women as well as Black men. So, of course, we were integral to every part of Creole cuisine.

Jo Reed: How do you think food helps define and preserve cultural narratives?

Zella Palmer: I think it helps to define cultural narratives… it's kind of like being a detective we can kind of-- when you start traveling or when you start-- if you go to Senegal, you go to Nigeria, different parts of Latin America or the Caribbean and you eat food in New Orleans or you eat Gullah Geechee cuisine, you start seeing the threads, you start seeing like, "whoa, jambalaya is just like Jollof rice," or “soupou kanja” is just like gumbo, oh my god" and you start remembering even recipes that your grandmother would make or different cultural habits and that might not have been specifically identified, but then you start realizing how intertwined our culture is. Even though so many tried to erase cultural memory, it's still very, it was still very difficult to erase and you start seeing patterns and making the connections and then you realize that in marginalized communities or particularly in Black and Indigenous communities, our food is sacred, it's so sacred, and for them to be able to remember the flavors and to recreate that in places where they were either enslaved or colonized is profound.

Jo Reed: I wonder with globalization and the rise of fusion cuisines, how you think traditional food practices and recipes are affected. There's always this balance between innovation and preservation. 

Zella Palmer:  Yeah, I think one of our biggest challenges is processed food, creolization has always been a part of our history as human beings.  However, I think what is challenging is the processed food market that now is creating a new food memory that can sometimes obliterate the memory of growing your own food or knowing what a real tomato tastes like, right? So then you all have a generation that have no idea what a real tomato tastes like, or "no, your chicken in that plastic package did not actually come like that." So when you see a real live chicken being killed, you're like, "oh!" freaking out, because you don't understand that process and also that respect to the land and the people who actually did the cultivating and making sure that they fed those animals that go into our belly. So farm-to-table is definitely a modern terminology, but it goes way back. Indigenous folks had been doing farm-to-table way before that was even a term.

Jo Reed: Okay, I have to ask, what do you like to cook? And how does food factor into your daily life?

Zella Palmer: I love to cook everything. I love food.

Jo Reed: I do too. I wake up and I think, "okay, what am I making for dinner tonight?" And I think about it all day. 

Zella Palmer: It's hard because when you live in New Orleans, it's so many good chefs and the people just always bringing around plates of food and you're just like, "oh, you know, what do I need to cook for?" But I do love redfish courtbouillon. That is one of my favorite dishes and I love to cook it with my students because our student newspaper that was founded in 1939, is named after courtbouillon. It's a classic Creole dish that has been lost for some time and at that in the 1930s, it was as popular as gumbo. So I love to make redfish courtbouillon with my students and get redfish straight from the Gulf and make this incredible sauce, the courtbouillon sauce that simmers with the redfish and then serve it with some heritage rice and just really start to get them to understand our history and just the whole legacy of redfish court-bouillon and how you can taste it in different parts of the world. And it's very similar to many other redfish stew sauces and fish stew sauces in different parts of West Africa, Central Africa and the Caribbean and even Latin America. So that is one of my favorite dishes and my children love my redfish court-bouillon. 

Jo Reed: Well, I have to give a shout out to your podcast, Culture and Flavor, which touches on many topics within African American culture and African culture too and I wonder how you decide on the topics and the guests?

Zella Palmer: I'm an introvert-extrovert. So if that makes sense to your listeners…

Jo Reed: I am too. 

Zella Palmer: Yes. I get tongue tied and I'm also have a very busy schedule, obviously, because any moment a student could walk into my office and “Miss Palmer, I need this" so I normally interview people that I know and so if I meet you along the way or I've been wanting to have a conversation with you, I'm just having an organic conversation because like I said, I am teaching most of the time and I have all these projects. Thank God for Heritage Radio Network that work with me, and it's just, to me, it's just a phone conversation. It works out, these are people that I have admired. They're friends of mine, colleagues and I am honored that they said yes and it's really just culture and flavor.

Jo Reed: Well, you said, and I wrote it down because I loved it. You said,” where there's flavor, there's history.” 

Zella Palmer: Absolutely and that is actually also included in my latest book, “Ed Mitchell's Barbecue”, which I was humbled and honored to write that book. Ed Mitchell was inducted into the National Barbecue Hall of Fame from Wilson, North Carolina, in the same town where my mother's grandfather is from. And to be able to write his story and also writing my story and that was the last recipe that my mother was able to share with me before she passed and they allowed me to put it in the book and tell some of our family stories. I'm super grateful for that. And it's such an honor just to be able to tell stories. I'm definitely a storyteller. I'm always humbled and honored and just always lifting up the legacy of my parents and just the beauty of the time period that they lived in before phones.

Jo Reed: Well every field of study has its challenges. So I wonder what challenges you faced in this work of African-American material culture?

Zella Palmer: I won't say necessarily challenges just yet, because I do believe that as a small HBCU, mighty HBCU, the illustrious Dillard University, we are part of this communiversity. I mean, we're wearing 20 hats and I'm grateful that I'm the third generation of my family to have worked at an HBCU. My great grandfather, Dr. Joseph Henry Ward, who was Madame C.J. Walker's personal doctor, worked at Tuskegee University and then my grandfather, Dr. Erskine Roberts, was a professor at Lincoln, Howard, and Tuskegee University, where he met my grandmother. So I have this understanding that this is what my purpose is and I think just working at an HBCU is allowing for us to have conversations and this drive and passion and understanding how important more than ever it is for our students to be global citizens and prepared for this world that is ever-changing.

Jo Reed: Well my next question was going to be what has been most rewarding, but you might just answer that.

Zella Palmer: My most rewarding is the smile on my students' faces and just watching them just blossom and watching them make meals. Or "Miss Palmer, I did this, I made the recipe from the cookbook." Our model for the Ray Charles program is where culture meets education and we literally take our students out of the classroom. If they're learning something about pralines, then we're going to the Herman Grima house to one of the oldest kitchens and during urban enslavement and they're making recipes from Creole cookery from the 1800s with our students. And we can talk about gender roles, class, all of these things and that is where the learning begins.

Jo Reed: So where do you see the future of African-American cultural studies heading?

Zella Palmer: I think the future is our students. African-American culture is global. We see that in everything. I mean, it is one of America's biggest exports and I don't think we put enough value on it and have enough conversations about that. But when you look at hip hop, jazz, literature, James Baldwin in Paris, John Coltrane. Our cultural bearers are telling our stories and I think it's just going to be a continuation of that and we're telling our stories now sometimes through social media, even when the rest of the world isn't ready for our stories. We always find a way to put it out there and to share and be in community because it's a beautiful human story.

Jo Reed: And I think that is a great place to leave it and thank you. I mean, truly, thank you for giving me your time, but thank you for all the wonderful work you've done and continue to do.

Zella Palmer: Thank you so much. We greatly appreciate your support.

Jo Reed: That was author. Educator, and filmmaker Dr. Zella Palmer, she’s director and chair of Dillard University’s Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture…..we’ll have a link to the program in our show notes as well as a link to her podcast “Culture and Flavor”  and for the recipe for Redfish Courtbouillon. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating on Apple—it will help people to find us.
For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.