NEW! Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers and Other Untold Stories

Five Plays by William S. Yellow Robe Jr., 2009

This collection of five plays portrays the complex issues that arise when mixed-blood American Indian characters come up against traditional Native beliefs. It shows how legislated and internalized racism has ravaged human relationships and created divisive struggles within Native American families and communities. The title play, Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers, examines the lingering effects of colonial exploitation of tensions between African American and Native American people in the nineteenth century. All of Yellow Robe's plays meditate on "the returning" to home, to community, and how the matter of belonging is a privilege.

Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, writes: "Bill Yellow Robe's voice is funny, honest, and searing. He tells painful truths that are designed to heal, and healing truths that are hard to hear. He writes from an utterly specific Native world, one we all need to know, but he uncovers human truths that are universal and profound. He is one of our necessary writers. We would be much poorer without him."

375 pp.

$18 paper; ISBN-13: 978-0-935626-59-9

William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. is an Assiniboine playwright, director, poet, actor, writer, and educator from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, located in northeastern Montana.

He has written more than forty-five plays, including full-length works, one-acts, a book for a musical, and children's plays. These include The Independence of Eddie Rose, Sneaky, The Star Quilter, The Body Guards, The Council, Falling Distance, A Great Thing, Native American Paranormal Society (NAPS), Wink-da, Hate: Old Ways Learn New Ways, The Pendleton Blanket, and A Broken Bottle-A Broken Family. His other book Where the Pavement Ends, a collection of one-act plays, was published in 2000 by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Yellow Robe is a recipient of the "First Nations Book Award for Drama," the first playwright to receive a Princess Grace Foundation Theater Fellowship, and the first Native American playwright to receive a Jerome Fellowship from the Minneapolis Playwrights' Center, and a New England Theater Foundation award for Excellence.

His plays have been presented in readings and productions at New York's Public Theater, The Ensemble Studio Theater, the American Conservatory Theater, Mark Taper Forum Play Labs, Honolulu Theater for Youth, New World Theater Company, the former Seattle Group Theater, Minneapolis Playwrights' Center, Illusion Theater, Montana Repertory Theater, and the Perishable Theater.

He is a member of the Penumbra Theater Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, Ensemble Studio Theater in New York, and the Board of Advisors for Red Eagle Soaring Theater Company (a Native youth theater company) of Seattle, Washington.

Yellow Robe is presently a part-time faculty member at the University of Maine. While serving as playwright in residence at Trinity Repertory Theatre, he was guest lecturer in Africana Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a faculty affiliate in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, and was awarded a Libra Diversity Professorship in 2004 at the University of Maine.