About The BROKEN HEART LAND Trilogy

HOOP JUMPER

BROKEN HEART LAND

BLOOD BOUNDARY

In 2011, Cherokee playwright Vicki Lynn Mooney embarked upon writing a trilogy of plays inspired by the many untold stories she discovered while researching her genealogy. While deciding where to begin, her great-grandmother Alma came to her in a dream and said "Tell my story first!"

The plays tell the multi-generational story of the Dawes Act, a government plan to register Indians on Federal rolls, but which sparked an orgy of exploitation and destroyed a unique and hopeful civilization.

In the short period of six years, all three plays were written and produced, in both New York and Oklahoma City, and all have received rave reviews. Actors and audiences alike respond to these plays with a newfound interest in a history that is not taught in schools.

In these tales of race, land, sex and power, a larger story unfolds that speaks to each of us about the making of the American West and the American character.

Obituary

Cherokee Playwright Vicki Lynn Mooney, age 76, died of natural causes on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, at home in Claremore, OK. Oldest child of Jimmie Lewis Gipson and Bonnie (Hamby) Gipson.

Born on March 21, 1949 in Tulsa, survived by her brother Jimmie Lewis Gipson Jr. of Tulsa, sister Cathy Jean (Gipson) Stitt of Charlotte, NC, and husband of 46 years Gerard (Gerry) Mooney of Claremore. Her first stage production was "Cake and Sippin' Whiskey" on NYC's Theatre Row in 1984. It was later published by Dramatic Publishing.

Raised in and around Tulsa, Vicki had a special place in her heart for Avant, the home of her paternal grandparents, Edgar and Flora Gipson. She was their first grandchild, and they doted on her curly blond locks, blue eyes, and happy disposition. She attended several grammar schools in and around Oklahoma due to her father's oil field work.

She and Gerry met in Tulsa in 1977. They subsequently moved to New York, where they wed at the 79th Street Boat Basin on August 12, 1979. She quickly became active in theatre. Working in development at The Writer's Theatre, founded by Tom Fontana, she wrote several plays including "Armadillo Chili" and "Film at Eleven".

Her monologue, "Sparrow", about the Oklahoma City bombing, was performed by Patricia Neal in Dobbs Ferry, NY, in 1997. It was the featured piece in "Patchwork", an evening of Vicki's one-acts and monologues. "Sparrow" was also an entry in the prestigious Ensemble Studio Theatre's One-act Festival in New York in 1997.

She went on to write The Broken Heart Land Trilogy, three interconnected plays about her own family in Tulsa in the years before and after statehood. The trilogy explores the destruction wrought by The Dawes Rolls, a Federal government plan to register native peoples. The three plays in the trilogy, "Hoop Jumper", "Broken Heart Land", and "Blood Boundary", have all been produced in New York and Oklahoma City.

Plans to stage the entire trilogy in Claremore in 2021 were upended by the Covid 19 Pandemic. Work will continue on bringing The Broken Heart Land Trilogy to the stage.

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Vicki Lynn Mooney, a native Oklahoman and member of the Cherokee Nation, has been writing plays since 1982. Her first play, "Cake and Sippin' Whiskey" was produced in NYC in 1984 and published by The Dramatic Publishing Company in 1985. Her work has been performed primarily at theatres in New York, Los Angeles, and Oklahoma. Ms. Mooney has been honored many times in national playwriting competitions and is published by Dramatic Publishing, Smith-Kraus, and the Cherokee Arts and Humanities Council. Her "Broken Heart Land" Trilogy was written, and had all three plays produced, within a six-year period.

Artist's Statement

Beginning in 2001 while researching my family genealogy, I was inspired by the many stories in Cherokee history that remain untold from a Native point of view. Ours is a history that is only marginally taught in schools, and when it is told it is tainted with colonialism. I joined the tribe in 2010 and decided to dedicate the rest of my life to writing the truth about our people. While casting about which story to tell, my great-grandmother came to me in a dream and said: "Tell my story first!"

In five years I completed a trilogy of stage plays (Hoop Jumper-2013, Broken Heart Land-2011, and Blood Boundary-2015) about the effect of the Dawes Act of 1880 on three generations of a mixed-blood Cherokee family in Indian Territory between 1900-1920. The Dawes Act was the largest land grab in US history, where 800 million acres (1,250,000 square miles) of tribal land was forcibly ceded to the government in return for citizenship and statehood. Land allotments were then granted back in minimal acreages to the small percentage of natives who survived the genocidal purges of previous decades. The remaining acreage was then distributed to white settlers under the banner of Manifest Destiny.

The main themes in all these works are finding and claiming your true identity, and the destruction of tribal culture through land theft and racism. My intention with the Trilogy is to tell this history from a Native point of view and create a truer picture of how The West was won.

My goal is to create as many meaningful jobs as I can for Native actors, directors, and technicians who are vastly underrepresented in the performing arts.