Making Home, Unmaking Domesticity: Love, Joy, and Other-than-Human Worlds in Kamloopa

Abstract

Kamloopa: An Indigenous Matriarch Story by Kim Senklip Harvey (Syilx and Tsilhqot’in) which won the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language drama, has been discussed by critics and scholars especially regarding Harvey’s decision not to invite critics to write formal reviews of the recent production in Toronto and to only invite “love letters” from Indigenous women for the premier production in Vancouver. This article offers a reading of Kamloopa that unpacks how Harvey’s refusal and radically different kind of invitation to engage is in continuation with the world of Kamloopa. It focuses on celebrations of love and joy as assertions of cultural and bodily sovereignty rooted in Indigenous women’s love for each other and their relationships with the more-than-human world. Following the three women characters who leave their “white” apartment in East Vancouver to go on a road trip to the largest powwow on the West Coast, the article studies how Kamloopa disavows the politics of the colonial domestic as it relates to the history of violence on Indigenous women in residential schools and the MMIWG2S crisis. It discusses how the women in Kamloopa also reject confinement in colonial narratives of violence that are tied with the material confinement of domesticity. The article argues that Harvey’s refusal of formal theatre reviews is in continuity with the play’s resistance of settler colonial “domestication” of Indigenous women’s lives, relations, and art.