This study seeks to determine if Native-controlled theatre could provide an opportunity for non-Natives to move past their understanding of Native Americans as static figures of the past and embrace members of Native American communities as individual, complex people. While Native-controlled theatre must first and foremost serve Native peoples, it also has the potential to help non-Natives recognize and learn from their possible misconceptions. I explore this possibility primarily through play analysis in three chapters. In chapter 1, I create a foundation for the ideology behind many non-Native Americans' need to utilize Native American stereotypes in order to reaffirm a national identity based on a frontier utopia. I then apply the discourse to play texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to establish that non-Natives still use theatre and Native characters to reaffirm a national identity. In chapter 2, I provide a general political history of Native Americans in the twentieth century in order to argue that Native-controlled theatre not only is a political act, but that Native characters serve a very different purpose for Native peoples than they do for non-Natives. Finally, in chapter 3, I argue that despite Native and non-Native Americans need to use Native characters and stories to fulfill different purposes, Native-controlled theatre can be used to teach non-Native audience members about contemporary Native lives. I apply Mary Louise Pratt's concept of a contact zone to two Native-written plays and found that the result could be that non-Natives learn about and from their misconceptions about Native Americans. Although the purposes behind theatrical practices continue to be some of the many factors that keep many Natives and non-Natives in direct conflict with one another, Native-controlled theatre has the ability to allow non-Natives to actually engage with and learn from Native peoples about Native lives today.