Dust Eaters is an intimate look at two families, one white, one Native American, living side by side in the west desert of Utah. The play covers a total of seven generations, from 1877 to the present. Each scene—a mini-drama of its own—takes place 20 years later than the one before, all in the same small house. We follow the life of Albertine who begins as a defiant 10-year-old Goshute girl living with a white family on a ranch next to her tribe's ancestral land. We trace the interdependence and resentment, the love and denial of the two families. In the end Albertine's great-grandchildren are grappling with a decision to store high-level nuclear waste on their reservation. The play is a chamber history that defines the past through everyday, intimate human detail and looks at the assumptions behind both cultural points of view.
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