Menil and Her Heart.

A play by Isabella Madrigal

Purpose

MMIWG2S (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit People)

  • 84% of Native women will experience violence in their lifetimes.

  • Indigenous women and girls go missing and are murdered at rates ten times higher than the national average.

  • 95% of these cases go undocumented by national news media.

    California has the largest native population in the country and ranks six in the nation with the highest number of MMIW. It’s time to alter the national narrative. It is time that people not only remember but know that this taking has been happening for 500 years and it must be stopped. No one is going to tell the story of a young Cahuilla girl for her; she must do it herself. Menil and Her Heart is written for for Jessica Mae Orozco, Jojo Boswell, Ieesha Nightpipe, Savannah La Fontaine Greywind; faceless names of the missing and murdered. It is for Isabella’s little cousin Maya, for her sister Sophia, and for her mother Renda who stand with her. It is for all the women and men who fight beside her performance after performance to share the forgotten story of their stolen sisters. To end the silence.

Menil and Her Heart

Menil and Her Heart is the recipient of the Yale University Young Native Playwright Award. Isabella first wrote Menil and Her Heart when she was sixteen years old as a cultural revitalization effort because she recognized a wisdom in Cahuilla stories that could be applied to the invisible epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit People. Menil and Her Heart subverts this narrative of violent erasure by centering the relationship of two Cahuilla sisters. Some of Menil and Her Heart’s most notable performances have occurred at Yale University and the California State Capital in 2023, where the cast performed for members of the legislature in an event that culminated in $12 million of program funding to address the issue of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons. When Isabella was seventeen, she visited the United Nations headquarters to speak about the play she had written and directed.

In an effort to expand this telling and the impact of this story because of interest from the community, Isabella and Sophia are now planning to co-direct Menil and Her Heart the short film. Menil and Her Heart the film follows two teenage sisters, Nesune and Menil. When Menil vanishes without a trace from their home on the Cahuilla reservation, and her family receives no help from local law enforcement, Nesune embarks on an interdimensional journey to find and bring justice for her missing sister. Transported to an ancient world where the Cahuilla stories that became buried in Nesune’s memory long ago are real, Nesune must find the wisdom in the old stories to save herself and her sister.