NEW YORK, NY.- If language is how we tell people who we are, what happens when a language is lost to history? Or, more accurately, when it’s violently erased?

In “Where We Belong,” which opened at the Public Theater on Wednesday, writer and performer Madeline Sayet tells the audience that she is named for Jeets Bodernasha (or Flying Bird), the last fluent speaker of Mohegan, a language once widely spoken by Indigenous people in the Northeast.

Sayet considers the legacy of her name an immense responsibility: one that moves her to grapple not only with how words can be used to preserve her ancestry but how they might also help others imagine a world where Indigenous people — who’ve been systemically displaced for centuries — actually belong.

“Ya, no pressure,” she says.

This autobiographical solo show, a co-production with Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, isn’t a traditional Mohegan story, Sayet notes. Instead, she says, it’s about how she “became a bird,” or faced the challenge bestowed by her name. Sayet begins by taking an aerial view, pointing out the arbitrariness of international borders as she embarks on her journey as a theater artist and researcher. And where does a drama die-hard go to explore the expressive powers of language but across the pond to study Shakespeare? For an Indigenous doctoral candidate also critical of colonialism, Britain is the belly of the beast.

Sayet’s account is rich with eye-opening (and jaw-dropping) details about the atrocities of imperialism and its reverberations. In 1735, Mohegan leader Mahomet Weyonomon made it all the way to England, where he planned to decry his people’s mistreatment. But he never had an audience with the crown; he died of smallpox during a monthslong wait and was tossed into a mass grave.

On a visit to the British Museum, Sayet meets with an academic who’s curious about her opinion on its North American exhibit, but she is sickened to learn during the exchange that the institution possesses the human remains of about 12,000 people from around the world that it has refused to return. (Don’t worry, he assures her, it hasn’t displayed any Native American remains for at least a decade.)

Shakespeare offers Sayet a source of comfort and escape — of language that’s long been revered, rather than forcibly snuffed out, and that articulates things she can’t.




“When I speak Shakespeare, people listen,” she says. “He has words for what I don’t.”

She even ventures to suggest that his work can be read as anti-colonialist. But, she later notes, the teaching of Shakespeare to Indigenous people can be traced back to schools founded with the purpose of assimilation, an unresolvable tension characteristic of Sayet’s project.

“There is possibility in Shakespeare’s poetry,” as Sayet suggests, though here its imaginative capacity is referenced in the abstract rather than mined for answers. Caliban in “The Tempest” has come to be read as a depiction of an Indigenous person, and Sayet briefly mentions that she directed a production of the play and that it began her career. Yet the focus here isn’t on what interpretive choices she may have made in that show but on her experience navigating academic and artistic fields with limiting expectations of her work.

“I fly. I land,” Sayet repeats, an avian logic animating her transitions from one beat to the next. Under the direction of Mei Ann Teo, Sayet traverses a mini mountain range beneath a storm cloud of light, bare bulbs descending from a lucent swirl, in a production design by Hao Bai that reflects the show’s resistance to linear momentum.

In the manner of a doctoral candidate, Sayet sets out with questions — about her own direction, her purpose — that seem to multiply. There’s courage in confessing such insecurity, and it’s probably natural for an artist seeking both to reclaim what’s been taken and to forge new ground. But as much as “Where We Belong” feels like a probing search for answers, there is little spontaneity or discovery to Sayet’s performance, which can feel like a recitation straining for emphasis rather than a vivid recollection. And audiences tend to grow restless without a clear sense of forward movement.

Still, the process of evaluating damage wrought over many lifetimes, and seeking reparative justice in creative forms, is messy, uncertain and invigorating, even when it falls short.

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‘Where We Belong’: Through Nov. 27 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.