Exclusive | Playwright shares her childhood story growing up the only Native American in an Italian Brooklyn nabe

As the only Native American in her Brooklyn neighborhood, Murielle Borst Tarrant’s stoop was her sanctuary.Tarrant grew up on Degraw Street between Court and Smith streets in 1970s Red Hook.

“The whole neighborhood was Italian,” she explained, but the Smith Street area was considered a Puerto Rican enclave.Being neither ethnicity, she was often mistaken for both.“You’d go down one block to one candy store, and the Puerto Ricans thought you were an Italian and you’d get chased down the block,” she recalled.

“And so I would go to another candy store and the Italians thought I was Puerto Rican and I would get chased down the block.“And because of that, I wasn’t allowed off my front stoop.”Her harrowing, and hilarious, childhood experiences are now the subject of her one-woman show, “Tipi Tales from the Stoop,” running at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in FiDi from Jan.9-11.Tarrant recalls her family’s monikers.“If they liked you, they called you ‘Indian,’ ‘Mr.

Indian,’ ‘Mrs.Indian.’ If they didn’t like you, you were called ‘Wahoo’ or ‘Chief,’ she told The Post.Tarrant, from the Kuna and Rappahannock tribe of Virginia, was born and raised in Red Hook.“My family migrated to New York City in the 1800s, when Brooklyn was considered the country,” she said.

Her mother still lives in her childhood home, which was purchased by her great-grandparents, and legend has it neighbors were against them moving into the borough.“That’s the tipi tale, as I say in the play, is that there was a petition going around that we wouldn’t buy it,” she said.Tarrant, the artistic director of Safe Harbors NYC, an initiative that promotes indigenous performing arts, recalls that Red Hook was “Mafia-run” at the time.“These were very nice guys in nice suits who bought tickets to our raffles, who gave money at our weddings and funerals,” she said.With the mob in town, there was no crime, and things like parking tickets w...