Recovering Ritual in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa and Luis Valdez ’ Mummified Deer

After recently teaching Mummified Deer, I became interested in the role of storytelling and Indigenous, it occurred to me that similar issues of memory and performance are significant in Luis Valdez ’ Mummified Deer and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. Both plays feature dance and music as well as pre Christian spiritual traditions connected to nature. Thus this paper examines these common themes in the two plays: traumatic histories; and dance performances which recover repressed cultural and spiritual traditions. The Irish and the Yaquis both endured centuries of colonization and repression. The full conquest of Ireland occurred during the 16th and 17th centuries and only ended when the treaty was signed in1921. The Yaqui wars began in 1533 and lasted until 1929 when the Yaquis were finally subdued by Mexico. Some scholars have made comparisons of post-colonial trauma among Irish and American Indians. Nancy Scheper-Hughes compared the histories of rural Irish and Pueblo Indians in “The Best of Two Worlds, the Worst of Two Worlds: Reflections on Culture and Field Work among the Rural Irish and Pueblo Indians. ” In her article, she noted shared experiences with the decline of village communities and loss of culture resulting in more frequent alcoholism, depression and suicide. The villages become inhabited mainly by an agin