The aesthetics of Native American theater is very different when compared to other theaters. This is mainly due to the perspectives of Native Americans and their world view being different. Though the mainstream Americans wished to give Native American culture an honorable burial, the Native Americans were not willing to vanish, but had actually begun to assert and articulate their own modalities. The Native American dramatists like Hanay Geiogamah reflect this authentic voice caught between assertion and erasure. The Native American theater includes their medicine men, oral traditions, powwows and many other tribal traditions. These plays grew out of the authors' desire to present Native Americans to Native Americans and to the rest of the Americans and the world in ways that are vivid and compelling, and free from the pernicious Euro-American stereotypes of Red Indians. The idea of alienation and humor is looked at differently by the Native Americans when compared to the perspectives of the majority of mainstream Americans.

Native American literature is not similar to Western literature, because the basic assumptions about the universe and the reality experienced by tribal people and that by a majority of Westerners are not the same. Native Americans acknowledge the essential harmony of all things i.e., they see all the things as of equal value in the scheme of the universe. Besides, in Native American theater there are strong cultural underpinnings of a religious and philosophical nature that have permeated and continue to permeate its development. The origins of Native American theater lie in the traditional ritual (sand paintings created by Navajo medicine men), public ceremony and storytelling. Native performances include great tribal ceremonies, such as dances, masked performances, the blessing ceremonies, the ghost dance, and the sacred clown ceremony of the Sioux. In the past, tribal communication had been person-to-person, group-to-group, and through storytelling, dance and ceremony in a familial setting. Winter was for tales, summer for dances, and early fall for feasting.

Aesthetics of Native American Theater: Hanay Geiogamah's Body Indian, American culture, honorable burial, tribal traditions, Euro-American stereotypes, Native American literature, tribal communication, tribal ceremonies, public ceremony, traditional ritual.