The stories about the Texas bluebonnet are as old as the hills and most of them include a Native American girl who first saw these amazing blue flowers. However, many of these versions of the legend involve the Comanche or one of the many plains tribes, despite the fact that these groups only arrived in Texas less than 400 years ago. Bluebonnets have been here a lot longer.
The people who were most likely to have seen the first bluebonnets were the ancestors of the Coahuiltecan people, original Texas Native Americans who have been here for thousands of years. So what is the Coahuiltecan’s legend of the bluebonnet?
This is one of the themes of “Yana Wana’s Legend of the Bluebonnet,” a play for young audiences produced by local nonprofit Indigenous Cultures Institute and Austin’s Teatro Vivo, and funded by the San Marcos Arts Commission, City of Austin’s Cultural Contracts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
