Indigenous Storytelling in the Contemporary World: An Interview with Drew Hayden Taylor

Abstract

Indigenous writers celebrate the resistance and survival of traditional storytelling in contemporary literature, and Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor has done his part in Canada. He is an award-winning playwright who has spread the knowledge of Ojibway storytelling he gained growing up on the Curve Lake First Nation, located in Peterborough (Ontario), where he still has a home and kindly received me there. Taylor has published thirty books which include plays, novels and short stories, and is also well-known as a journalist and filmmaker, with documentaries such as Red Skins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew (2000) on Native humor, and Searching for Winnetou (2018), which opened the Asinabka Festival in Ottawa this year. One of the themes that Drew Hayden Taylor explores in his writings is identity. In a very humorous way, he uses his experience of growing up in an Indigenous community as a blond and blue-eyed Ojibway to question stereotypes associated with Indigenous people. The experience of moving from Curve Lake to the city of Toronto also gave him a critical perspective about stereotypes associated with Indigenous people and the complexities of Indigenous experience on the reserve and in city life, as we observe in his book Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (1996).