Larissa FastHorse originally wrote The Thanksgiving Play in response to theatre-makers' complaints that they could not produce her other works due to a lack of indigenous actors. The Thanksgiving Play, therefore, does not include any indigenous roles and instead centers itself around the very issue of pursuing representation without the people you are trying to represent. Upon first watching the show, audiences may leave the performance having come to the same conclusion as the characters: true representation is impossible to do well, and it’s better to say nothing than to try “too hard.” But is that really what FastHorse is asking of her audience? Is The Thanksgiving Play a snarky way of telling white people to keep their noses and “activism” out of places where they don’t belong and stay as passive spectators? A closer reading of the play reveals the characters to be continually contradicting themselves; they seem to care deeply about social issues, but are completely oblivious of their own ignorance and intolerance; they are attempting to create dialogue, but can’t communicate with one another. I have taken a deconstructive and phenomenological approach to understand how the binary of passivity/activity represented in Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play works against the perceived message around political activism, yet somehow still succeeds in calling audiences to find a space of truly meaningful engagement. The results of my analysis will provide a glimpse into one way that the controversial topic of modern casting practices is being discussed in contemporary theatrical productions. Along with an analysis of the text itself, I will bring in information on historical activist theatre to understand the ways in which The Thanksgiving Play both follows and contradicts the conventions of its genre in order to further its message, especially in relation to Brechtian Epic Theatre. I will also include information from three different receptions of one LA production of the show in order to understand what audiences seemed to get out of it, and how their interpretations interact with each other and the ideas of Cultural Activism.