Resilient Matriarchs

Abstract

‘Rising Matriarchs: Honouring kinship, resilience and resurgence in an Indigenous adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women, written by Sabina Sweta Sen-Podstawska with Floyd Favel, offers an exploration of an Indigenous adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women through Floyd Favel’s Native Performance Culture (NPC), an Indigenous theatre method. The Greek story of the plight of the dispossessed and disempowered women of Troy is adapted to follow the realities and aftermaths of invasion of Indigenous nations and Indigenous women’s bodies in Canada. The article presents how the NPC method’s incorporation of Indigenous cultural practices, storytelling, vocal patterns, Plains Indigenous Sign Language (PISL) and sitting positions inside Indigenous structures leads to a re-storying of invasion and its aftermaths. In this process, the original Greek story is transformed to give hope and empower by reconnecting with the stories of the matriarchs and their place in the communities. The authors discuss how by performing this re-storying, the adaptation intervenes and dismantles the colonial and patriarchal power structures of oppression and at the same time offers resurgence and renewal at this unpredictable time by bringing into the centre the stories of women’s resistance and resilience. Drawing from the Indigenous concept of relationality and kinship, this article explores how the performance of ancestral matriarchal stories and lived experiences lead to personal and embodied stories and acts of transformation and offers healing from the impacts of colonization, irrational patriarchal forces and intergenerational trauma. Ultimately, this theatrical project becomes part of a larger movement of decolonization, resurgence and renewal that rises out of the ruptures caused by the colonial invasion.