We are, after all, here to see a play by Shakespeare.

There, sir, stop. Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that’s gone.—Prospero, The Tempest

DOWN THE RIVER TOURS BY WILLIAM TAMPLIN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 135

What, ho! What, ho! Good evening and hi-te-tó! Hakíhowésilásamámo?!

I’d like to welcome each of you to tonight’s production of The Tempest by William Shakespeare. And what a tempestuous year it’s been, full of monsters and spirits stirred up by the maelstroms of our collective past. Pasts, I should say.

And, oh—I would also like to thank our instrumentalists for that wonderful scene-setting, traditional Arab music from the Isle of Sycorax, the occupied Arab island of Lampedusa, thought to be the inspiration for Shakespeare’s immortally imperialist play.

And we could not have asked for a gentler night here in Central Park at Sixth and Magnolia in beautiful downtown Louisville on a late summer’s evening not threatened by rain, although Apple weather has been predicting it all day.

And look at you all! More diverse than the audience last night, although that’s not saying much. We are, after all, here to see a play by Shakespeare, a cis-het white male who made his living writing plays for an alien empire, it goes without saying.

But back to the weather. At least perhaps the native humidity here can get you in the mood of a sultry Mediterranean isle—the domain of Sycorax—native and indigenous, Arab and African, single mother and woman of color, living outside the boundaries of genre, of prescriptive womanhood—whose island was wrested from her, appropriated, occupied, and colonized by Prospero.

Speaking of nativity, and before I begin thanking the sponsors, I’d like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the great debt we owe the First Peoples who once inhabited the land this open-air theater stands on. And still do inhabit it in spirit. Where Louisville, Kentucky now sits gawping like a monstrous, sweaty, bald, obese riverboat bartender—ha ha!—where this city stands, so I was saying, the Shawnee people once lived, hunted, fished, and farmed. And fought.

But I won’t stop there with a routine land acknowledgment. I would instead like to call us all to profess our living witness to the truth lying beneath this great meadow, this dark and bloody ground.

Before white alien Europeans invaded it, Kentucky was home to a thriving native civilization of around 4500 Shawnee. The US government decided to purchase the majority of the land south of the Ohio River from the Cherokee, even though the Shawnee also claimed Kentucky as their hunting grounds. The whites—was it the British or the Americans? I can’t remember; does it really make a difference?—had coerced the Iroquois into selling out years before.

So what does Uncle Sam do about competing land claims?

In the fashion of rapacious colonialists the world over, the government went to the lowest buyer—who were, as I said, the Cherokee, safely hemmed in in their redoubts in the Blue Ridge. And by no means were all the Cherokee on board. But in the end, the Cherokee leadership, its one per cent, sold, and white alien settlers began—continued, rather—moving in.

It’s what we at River City Shakespeare call supremacy with the veneer of legitimacy.