Lynn Riggs and the Art of Citizenship

Lynn Riggs was born a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in 1899 and became a citizen of the US by a special act of Congress in 1901. Once he left the Indian Territory of his childhood and the young state of Oklahoma, he established a network of friends and collaborators in the arts in places such as Santa Fe, Hollywood, Provincetown, and New York City. Riggs found the most satisfying experience of belonging within this community of artists, in which he practiced and later theorized a kind of aspirational citizenship: the people in his built community supported each other personally, professionally, and financially and collaborated on works of art. Riggs's life as a gay Cherokee dramatist provides a compelling and, for the period, an anomalous answer to an enduring question in Native American and Indigenous Studies: How does an Indigenous person respond when statehood and US citizenship erase (or aspire to erase) belonging in a tribal nation, enforce the denial of one's Indigeneity, and require Native people (among others) to endure various forms of exclusion (e.g., segregation, isolation on reservations, suppression of voting rights, racial violence)?