Tomson Highway Research Articles

Queer Theatre in Canada (review)

Reviewed by: Queer Theatre in Canada Emily A. Rollie Queer Theatre in Canada. Edited by Rosalind Kerr. Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English, vol. 7. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2007; pp. xix + 282. $30.00 paper. Rosalind Kerr's Queer Theatre in Canada explores the queering of the English Canadian stage. Bringing together a variety of Canadian perspectives on the topic, Kerr's text aims "to put together important pieces of the puzzle" (vii) that have contributed to and now comprise contemporary Canadian queer theatre in English. The Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English series, to which this volume belongs, was established in 2005 by general editor Ric Knowles to recognize the burgeoning field of English Canadian theatre studies. While some volumes in the series focus on individual artists such as Judith Thompson and George Walker, most others focus on larger areas of study such as Aboriginal, feminist, and African Canadian theatre. Intended to "carve out both familiar and new areas of work" in English Canadian theatre, the volumes in the series reprint important scholarly essays and "attempt to fill in . . . significant gaps by highlighting work from and about marginalized communities" (iv). Considering that no full-length study of English Canadian queer theatre currently exists, Kerr's Queer Theatre in Canada fits nicely within the series's parameters and fills a decided gap in Canadian theatre scholarship. Featuring twenty-one essays from major Canadian theatre artists and scholars, the anthology takes a critical and remarkably comprehensive look at the past and present state of Canadian queer theatre. Kerr (who is also the editor of Lesbian Plays: Coming of Age in Canada) begins with a critical introduction in which she succinctly explains and identifies the "points of intersection between gay and lesbian theatre and queer theory" (viii). With engaging and accessible writing, she effectively situates this work within the larger field of queer theory, then draws attention to the ways this theory impacts each essay, creating an overall sense of cohesion and illuminating their common themes. Like other volumes in the series, Queer Theatre in Canada features no thematic chapters or formal divisions of its contents; rather, the essays are organized chronologically, according to the date of each piece's original publication. Twelve of the twenty-one essays were originally published between 1972 and 2005; the remaining nine were commissioned by Kerr specifically for this volume in an attempt to fill historical gaps and offer perspectives not recognized in previous queer scholarship. As a result, the chronological organization of the text proves somewhat misleading, for many of the later essays, although written more recently, explore historical, rather than current, queer performances. The text begins with two essays that reflect foundational moments in the development of English Canadian queer theatre. Neil Carson's 1972 article, "Sexuality and Identity in Fortune and Men's Eyes," examines the play by John Herbert that many consider to be the first Canadian play to explicitly address homosexuality. Directly following Carson's article, Robert Wallace's "Homo Creation: Toward a Poetics of Gay Male Theatre" (originally published in French in 1988 and translated into English in 1994) further articulates early conceptions of a queer Canadian theatrical sensibility and, in conjunction with Carson's article, effectively lays the groundwork for the subsequent essays. The rest of the book approaches queer theatre from a variety of theoretical and practical angles. Reid Gilbert analyzes the staging of the gay male body in works by Robert LePage, Terrence McNally, and David Drake, illustrating the continued debate surrounding theatrical portrayals of sex and gender, while Susan Bennett offers a compelling account of the critical response to Canadian productions of Angels in America. While several plays discussed here—such as Angels in America—are not of Canadian origin, the authors analyze these texts through a distinctly Canadian lens, considering Canadian productions and connecting issues raised by the texts to a Canadian conception of queerness. Other essays, such as Susan Billingham's insightful reading of Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, focus specifically on Canadian playwrights' work. Still other articles explore broader performance-based events: from Darrin Hagen's observations on homophobia and masculinity in World Wrestling Federation wrestling...

Troubling tricksters: revisioning critical conversations

Troubling tricksters: revisioning critical conversations

Drew Hayden Taylor: Essays on His Works (review)

Reviewed by: Drew Hayden Taylor: Essays on His Works Terry Goldie (bio) Robert Nunn , editor. Drew Hayden Taylor: Essays on His Works. Guernica. 254. $20.00 In the mid-seventies, when I did my PhD on Canadian drama, we seemed on the cusp of a renaissance, in both the drama and the criticism of it. It seemed to us that playwrights such as Carol Bolt and David Freeman would soon be as well known as Margaret Laurence and Mordecai Richler. There would be books and books on the drama and the dramatists. It was all just a matter of time. Well, it has not worked out that way. Today it would be ridiculous to claim any playwright has the stature of a Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje. There are a few who are quite well known, such as Brad Fraser and Judith Thompson, but I would argue even they are not recognized the way John Gray and David French were back in the day. If there is an exception, it might be Tomson Highway. We speak so often about Canada's failures to deal with First Nations that it is interesting that a Native playwright should have such prominence. There could be many explanations, but one might be that Native theatre made its big push almost two decades after that renaissance of Canadian theatre. The faces are fresher. Besides Highway, other playwrights who came to the fore include Daniel David Moses and Drew Hayden Taylor. The latter is best known as a humorist. In an interview included in this volume he admits that he is often called the Neil Simon of Native playwrights. I would rather call him the Alan Ayckbourn. Taylor offers a constant ironic take on the foibles of Native life, on and off the reserve. Like Ayckbourn, when at his worst, Taylor can be facile. Stephen Leacock said that he could spot a joke at twenty paces and Taylor can fire at the joke instead of searching for meaning. However, again like Ayckbourn, the best work by Taylor represents real people who self-consciously ironize their existence. Taylor puts on stage not just 'alterNatives,' as in the title of one of Taylor's best plays, but 'real Indians,' full of the contorted mirroring that such an inevitably scare-quote identity produces for any intelligent human being. In the interview he speaks of discovering that a play with six characters should not work through humour but through 'six different senses of humour.' Robert Nunn, the editor of the present collection, is another name worth noting. While the academic criticism of Canadian drama has not developed as we would have liked, certain soldiers have continued to fight the good fight. Nunn is exemplary of this group. Whether as editor or author of numerous articles, he has maintained his focus on [End Page 539] what Canadian dramatists have accomplished. I of course have no idea how this book was added to the Guernica Writers Series, but it is worthy of note that Taylor is the first playwright to be included. I suspect this volume represents some careful promotion on Nunn's part. But what of the book itself? Well, like most such collections, it is uneven. I doubt that there is anything here that anyone will find essential. Like most modern 'realist' drama, the part of Taylor's work that is not obvious is hard to reach for a critic. Many resort to the usual identification of trickster elements but I personally found nothing in these analyses that goes beyond just that - the usual. Jonathan Dewar's piece is interesting but more as a comment on the problem of the critic than on Taylor's work. Robert Appleford offers a general but insightful look at how humour works, with particular attention to Taylor. On the whole, I am more interested in what the book represents: a professional response to a professional playwright. Might Canadian drama be coming of age yet again? Terry Goldie Terry Goldie, Department of English, York University Copyright © 2010 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

The City as a Site of Trauma and Transformation: Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and Tomson Highway’s

Cet article s’intéresse au sort des Indiens d’Amérique dans la ville, tel qu’il est reflété dans deux romans d’écrivains amérindiens, des Premières Nations : Indian Killer, de Sherman Alexie (1996) et Kiss of the Fur Queen, de Tomson Highway (1998). Alexie offre un traitement brutalement réaliste de la vie urbaine et recourt à une écriture plate et sans fioritures, visant à la confrontation et au malaise, à la résistance et à l’indignation, et ne laissant aucune place à la rédemption ou au salut. Au contraire, le roman dense, riche en métaphores de Highway s’oriente vers la possibilité d’une rencontre entre des cultures incompatibles, irréconciliables, et s’adonne à un art amphibie, rassemblant une culture traditionnelle tribale et un modernisme européen et américain—un art incitant à réunir, de manière responsable, une identité interculturelle et une mémoire tribale et devenant ainsi, essentiellement, un "art de la ville".

The trickster wink: storytelling and resistance in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen

This essay explores how Tomson Highway uses the narrative genre as a space to perform a speech act of resistance against colonialism through an approach that departs from contemporary discussions on genre theory and theories of storytelling. Highway´s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen reaffirms the process of adaptation that is intrinsic to Indigenous cultures and to the survival of the Trickster and promotes a healing experience through the recovery of Cree storytelling. John Frow's concept of genre as a performative structure that shapes the world in the very process of putting it into speech contributes to the focus on Indigenous storytelling rather than on Western literary categories.

Weesageechak Begins to Dance: Toward a Pedagogy of Performance and the Possibilities for Decolonizing the Stage

Having marked its twenty-fifth anniversary during the 2007/8 season, Toronto-based Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA) continues to operate as Canada’s oldest Aboriginal theatre company. NEPA has been active as a creative collective in the Toronto theatre scene since the early eighties and formally became a theatre company in 1982. Then, with its production of Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters in 1986, NEPA expanded into a fully professional theatre company, producing works by prominent and emerging Aboriginal artists and giving Aboriginal and Indigenous voices, which historically have been silenced or under-represented, opportunities to speak.

Invisible Indigeneity: First Nations and Aboriginal Theatre in Japanese Translation and Performance

Invisible Indigeneity:First Nations and Aboriginal Theatre in Japanese Translation and Performance Beverley Curran (bio) Abstract This paper will investigate the politics of theatre translation and translation theatre at work in the recent Rakutendan productions of The Rez Sisters and Up the Ladder, in order to suggest how indigenous theatre travels and is transformed by different bodies, languages, and audiences. The essay begins with a brief historical overview of the myth of Japan’s racial/cultural homogeneity and the particular issue of visibility in somatic and semantic terms. It then focuses on the two productions and considers telling aspects of their textual translations, as well as the ways in which they negotiated the fine line between translation theatre performance and cultural appropriation. Introduction "Translators are angels," begins a poem by John Mateer, "perfect nobodies: nameless/voiceless, winged incandescence, except when we're bad."1 This describes a popular albeit problematic notion of the invisible role of the translator/interpreter, who assumes a faithful or neutral posture in his or her linguistic mediation. But can it ever be applied to a theatre translator whose linguistic mediation is meant to be embodied and performed? The Japanese term yakusha aurally conflates the roles of translator and actor, and Emori Tooru, who translated Peter Shaffer's 1979 play Amadeus, has described the process of theatre translation as one that "makes its passage through the body."2 Emori refers specifically to the attention paid by the translator to the sounds of the original text, its rhythms and tempo that will be expressed onstage through the actor's voice and body. The suggestion that theatre translation must take into account the fictional orality of a dramatic text right down to its vibrations in the vocal chords seems extraordinarily demanding as a very physical translation theory. Nevertheless, this essay argues that the task of the theatre translator and its somatic demands grow even more complex when First Nations and Aboriginal drama "makes its passage" through the tongues and bodies of translators and actors in contemporary Japan. The plays discussed in this essay, The Rez Sisters by First Nations playwright Tomson Highway and Up the Ladder by Australian Aboriginal playwright Roger Bennett, were both performed in Japanese by the Tokyo-based Rakutendan theatre group. The plays themselves are intimately concerned with the politics of representation as well as interpretation, so it matters who tells these stories and who enacts them onstage. In their performance by Japanese actors, the politics of theatre translation come into play as well because "the physical connection to the living history of these stories has been broken [End Page 449] by the play's journey to Japan—one cannot simply 'act' indigenous."3 The Rakutendan productions, then, are provocative because contemporary performances of these plays in Canada or Australia, for example, would likely acknowledge the sensitive issue of cultural appropriation by casting Native actors to play the roles. For theatre audiences as well, the "adequacy or inadequacy of a performance cannot deny the interference of non-Other playing Other."4 More importantly, as Aboriginal director and playwright Wesley Enoch, who collaborated as a director on Rakutendan's production of Up the Ladder emphasized in a post-performance talk, "In indigenous productions, the politics of the play are written on the body." The question that motivates this essay is: what then are the politics of theatre translation of such plays? The Japanese bodies onstage seem to erase the somatic representation of the political, but a closer consideration of Rakutendan's productions suggests that the missing body is a deliberate translation strategy that allows the First Nations and Aboriginal playwrights to tell their stories as well as allow the performances to address the particular situation of assimilated and invisible minorities in Japan. The plays themselves resist a verisimilitude or essentialism that is so often a central concern in representations of indigenous people in all genres.5 Their casting and production in Japan not only call into question the mythic homogeneity of the Japanese, but also assist the playwright in undermining the representation of indigeneity as homogeneous and unchanging. In short, the First Nations and Aboriginal plays speak of and perform how indigenous bodies come to matter...

Unraveling the Knot of Acculturation and Resistance in Anthony Thrasher’s Skid Row Eskimo

Unraveling the Knot of Acculturation and Resistance in Anthony Thrasher’s Skid Row Eskimo Sam McKegney (bio) Few residential school survival narratives have found their way to publication as literature. Segments of hundreds of (largely anonymous) survivor accounts exist within historical studies and government publications, but these are mainly invoked as testimonial evidence and discussed in distinctly non-literary terms. (Such presentation is unsurprising, of course, given the veracity of such accounts depends on their perceived transparency, on the orator’s reluctance to ornament, to mould, to play.) In a few instances, however, indigenous survivors have had occasion to record their residential school experiences within book-length memoirs which profit from the technologies of literary analysis. Such life-writings emerge, for the most part, from an extremely small sector of the indigenous population within the geographical space of Canada. A cursory glance at the careers of authors of some of the most famous residential school survival narratives—Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, Rita Joe1—reveals their distinguished status among the elite of Native letters: all have multiple publications; all are educators, lecturers, and activists [End Page 129] as well as writers; all are considered pillars of their tribal communities and of the Native arts community in general; all have received honorary doctorates from Canadian academic institutions and two of the three are members of the Order of Canada (Johnston is a member of the Order of Ontario). Highway, Johnston, and Joe are among the extraordinary success stories to emerge from the assimilationist machinery of the residential school system. As a result, their life-writings both dramatize and serve as evidence for the capacity of the individual to overcome institutionalized trauma. They also relate how tribal languages, customs, and spirituality can participate in the healing of wounded identities which can ultimately be reasserted as viable, healthy, and ongoing through the magic of art. In short, these texts inspire hope with messages of possibility.2 However, these narratives remain haunted by the absence of other stories. They exist in the shadow of a far greater number of tales of perpetual disillusion, unhealed pain, and ongoing fragmentation of indigenous identity, tales that have remained either untold or hidden from the literary community within obscure sociological, political, and academic archives. As Highway, Johnston, and Joe are only too aware, their survival narratives carry with them, as obligatory subtext, the understanding that others have not similarly survived, that the overwhelming majority of former residential school students have never been able to achieve stable indigenous identities much less write about them.3 As Cree writer and editor Greg Young-Ing has noted: [The residential school system] was hardly a training ground or a vehicle for promoting Aboriginal literature. One impact of the residential school system was to effectively stifle the Aboriginal Voice by denying generations of children access to their cultural knowledge while instilling in them negative perceptions of their cultural identities. Even if exceptional children [End Page 130] were able to miraculously overcome these impositions, as well as the other racial, social and economic barriers, they were not given adequate skills enabling them to write. (180) Young-Ing continues by quoting Stoh:lo writer Lee Maracle’s assertion that residential schools produced “languageless generations [by forbidding] them to speak their own language and imped [ing] their mastery of English, creating an entire population, with few exceptions, who were unfamiliar with language in general” (180). Furthermore, residential school denied its students access to those resources that might otherwise have assisted their struggle to overcome trauma incurred within the residential school setting (including, of course, appallingly common sexual and physical abuse, but also the trauma of familial separation and denial of nurturing and affection). Residential school policy endeavoured to drive a wedge between youth and elders, children and parents, students and their cultural heritage, creating a situation in which communal and cultural networks for healing were seldom accessible to students after their release from institutionalization. Within this context it is entirely unsurprising that Highway, Johnston, and Joe are the exception rather than the rule for post-residential school literary accomplishment. This paper deals with one of the few extant “other stories”: Inuit writer Anthony Apakark Thrasher’s...

George Ryga's "Hail Mary" and Tomson Highway’s Nanabush: Two Paradigms of Religion and Theatre in Canada

In 1967 George Ryga wrote The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, ironically celebrating Canada’s centennial with the first Canadian play to portray the tragedy of our aboriginal peoples; it subsequently became a canonical staple of Canadian theatre. Depicting the martyrdom of a Native girl on the streets of Vancouver, it was a powerful consciousness-raising experience for its white, middle-class audiences. Nevertheless, the play simplistically sentimentalised the aboriginal plight as the victimisation of passive children by irresponsible white parents: a Eurocentric, patriarchal paradigm that reflected the Department of Indian Affairs’ assimilation-ist policies.

"God of the Whiteman! God of the Indian! God Al-fucking-mighty!": The Residential School Legacy in Two Canadian Plays

Just as revelations of massive abuse at residential schools began to become public in the late 1980s, two major plays appeared on Canadian stages chronicling the damages done to First Nations by the Catholic Church. Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and Wendy Lill's Sisters were the first plays to address the residential school legacy. Dry Lips dramatizes the impact of missionary Catholicism on one reserve but makes no overt reference to the residential school experience. Sisters looks at a Catholic residential school but focusses on the white nuns rather than the Native children. In the context of residential school histories and literature, this essay examines the plays' theatrical forms and silences with specific reference to trauma theory and a series of debates in 1988-1989 around the issues of Native peoples going public about their experiences of the schools and non-Native writers appropriating Native stories.

From Trickster Poetics to Transgressive Politics: Substantiating Survivance in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen

Our poets . . . are the only ones today who can provide this bridge, this reflective statement of what it means and has meant to live in a present which is continually overwhelmed by the fantasies of others of the meaning of past events. Vine Deloria Jr., New and Old Voices of Wah'Kon-Tah And today, we are talking about the imagination of tribal stories, and the power of tribal stories to heal. Stories that enlighten and relieve and relive. Stories that create as they're being told. And stories that overturn the burdens of our human existence. Gerald Vizenor, "Trickster Discourse" From 1879 to 1986 the Canadian government removed Indigenous children from their homes and communities and placed them in residential schools run by the Christian churches in an effort to, in the words of inaugural Prime Minister John A. MacDonald, "do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit for the change" (qtd. in Ennamorato 72). Like American boarding schools, Canadian residential schools acted as a weapon in a calculated attack on Indigenous cultures, seeking through such now infamous procedures as familial separation, forced speaking of non-Native languages, and propagandist derogation of pre-contact modes of [End Page 80] existence and Native spiritual systems to compel its inmates into assimilation. The results of this onslaught are now widely documented: Native children divorced from their traditional cultures while at the same time refused entry into prosperous white Canada through inferior educational practices and racism, institutionalized to occupy a liminal space characterized by disillusion, identity crisis, and despair. The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities.1 In dealing with this history, narratives by residential school survivors have generally been perceived as performing two political functions: The first involves the creation of healthier communities through the cathartic re-visitation of past trauma by individual victims. According to this line of thinking, the extended critical rumination required to render residential school experience in narrative form allows the writer to purge emotional baggage associated with childhood trauma and achieve some form of closure and healing, which ultimately spills back upon the political unit of the community in the form of a healthier and more potentially productive individual. The second involves the production of testimonial evidence that forms the precondition for litigation against individual abusers and administrative overseers. Survivor testimony underlies the thousands of residential school lawsuits currently before the courts. It also forms the backbone of nearly all recent critical challenges to the Canadian government regarding its role in residential schooling.2 This article examines the capacity for a text that departs significantly from both standard avenues for political effect, Cree writer Tomson Highway's 1998 Kiss of the Fur Queen, to nonetheless perform a significant and identifiable political function in relation to the residential school legacy. Initially written as an autobiography, Kiss of the Fur Queen went through incarnations as a stage play, a made-for-TV movie, and an estimated eight-hundred-page epic before being published as a novel less than half that size.3 Although the writing may have performed various psychologically and spiritually redemptive tasks for its author, [End Page 81] the ultimate textual product—subject to editorial intervention, alterations in genre, and processes of material manufacture—can evidence those tasks solely through implication. Furthermore, although built from the raw materials of its author's life, Kiss of the Fur Queen explicitly distances itself from survivor testimony, stating in its acknowledgements, "This book, of course, is a novel—all the characters and what happens to them are fictitious" (v). The central questions for this article are, therefore, How...

Canada and the Idea of North, and: Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Canada and the Idea of North, and: Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture Russell Morton Brown (bio) Sherrill E. Grace. Canada and the Idea of North McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002. xxiv, 341. $49.95 Renée Hulan. Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002. 245. $75.00, $27.95 As their titles suggest, these two books, published in 2002 by the same press, share much in common. Each offers a survey of the cultural significance of the North in Canada. Each, though written by an academic based in an English department, takes a broad interdisciplinary approach. (Sherrill E. Grace investigates a variety of cultural media: music, art, drama, poetry, and fiction; Renée Hulan also discusses literary representations but emphasizes non-fictional accounts that include ethnographic descriptions, travel narratives, and adventure stories.) Each carefully sketches its theoretical positions in detail. And each owes a debt to Foucault: Grace characterizes Canada and the Idea of North as a Foucauldian attempt to describe 'the discursive formation of the North,' and, while Hulan never explicitly cites Foucault, much of the analysis in Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture reflects her ideas about discourse as a form of power. Despite these similarities, Canada and the Idea of North and Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture take opposing positions on most issues. For example, at the outset each notices the way Canadian culture has often failed to distinguish between the idea of 'Canada-as-North' - a concept that has served Canadian identity formation - and the physical reality of North as a geographical location, but Hulan views the failure to distinguish between the two as dangerous, especially to indigenous people and others who inhabit the North as a physical location; Grace, though certainly sensitive to such issues, treats the slippage as value-neutral and integral to her topic. Grace, the senior scholar, draws together the thoughts, reading, and experiences of twenty years to provide a panorama of Canadian depictions of North and to orchestrate these into a meditation on how the 'idea of North' (a phrase borrowed from the title of a Glenn Gould soundscape) has functioned in Canadian culture. Hulan, the newly minted scholar (her book has its genesis in a 1996 Ph.D. thesis), offers a survey that is critical of the geographical determinism she sees deriving from this 'nordicity of national identity' and creating a dominant discourse that 'seeks to unify and to shape collective experience and, in so doing, smooth over differences.' Perhaps the differences between these two scholars are more than generational; perhaps they arise from distinct personal or political visions. Grace says she has written her book 'because I am Canadian and [out of] my love for and desire to understand this stubborn, complex, infuriating place that I call home.' Hulan, in contrast, identifying the idea of North as a dangerous myth that needs to be delineated only so it can be demystified, [End Page 456] moves in the direction of polemic and tells us that that such understandings are fundamentally ideological, gendered, and 'tainted by reactionary history.' (She concludes one chapter with the warning: 'Study and critique of these myths must be vigilant in reading the romantic and mystifying views that have their roots in nineteenth-century ideas about race, gender, and nationalism, especially when considering calls to place the north at the centre of future national imagining.') Tracing out 'the familiar quest position of separation, initiation, and return' in ethnographic scholarship and popular adventure tales, Hulan thinks the Native perspective and presence has been overwritten by the appropriation of the North as a cultural symbol that produces stereotypes useful to the dominant culture. Grace, in contrast, sees the dominant discourse as more flexible and complex- and as evolving and subject to challenge. (She takes Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen as exemplifying the possibility of an effective response to tradition: 'In one magical stroke Highway has indigenised the Christian Holy Family, and inscribed the Cree version of how babies arrive on earth into the discursive formation of the North.') As correctives to one another, it is good to have...

“God of the Whiteman! God of the Indian! God Al-fucking-mighty!”: The Residential School Legacy in Two Canadian Plays

Just as revelations of massive abuse at residential schools began to become public in the late 1980s, two major plays appeared on Canadian stages chronicling the damages done to First Nations by the Catholic Church. Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Ought a Move to Kapuskasing and Wendy Lill’s Sisters were the first plays to address the residential school legacy. Dry Lips dramatizes the impact of missionary Catholicism on one reserve but makes no overt reference to the residential school experience. Sisters looks at a Catholic residential school but focusses on the white nuns rather than the Native children. In the context of residential school histories and literature, this essay examines the plays’ theatrical forms and silences with specific reference to trauma theory and a series of debates in 1988-1989 around the issues of Native peoples going public about their experiences of the schools and non-Native writers appropriating Native stories.

The Configurations of Gender in Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing

Tomson Highway (Cree, Brochet Reserve), the first Native playwright to achieve recognition in mainstream Canadian theatre and literary criticism, has opened a lot of doors for those who follow. Combining pragmatism with idealism, his work unflinchingly exposes conditions on the reserve but retains hope for positive. cross-cultural transformation. This article undertakes a close analysis of gender dynamics in Highway's second published play

Roses on the Rez: Chronicle of a Failure?

The proverbial assertion that all good things come in threes apparently does not apply to Tomson Highway’s dramatic output. Following the startling success of The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Highway had every reason to believe that the third instalment of his projected seven-play Rez cycle, the musical Rose, would have theatre producers scrambling to get it staged. After all, it had most of the ingredients of Highway’s earlier plays – the salty Rez characters, the poignant mixture of gritty humour and cutting despair, the colourful language, the treatment of relevant social issues, an intriguing, multi-layered story – and so much more: music, dance, magical transformations, elaborate spectacle. But thirteen years after it was first conceived, Rose has yet to receive a professional production.

Remembering the Trickster in Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters

Remembering the Trickster in Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters

Remembering the Trickster in Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters

For critics of Tomson Highway's theatre, the character of Nanabush has become something of a distraction. Nanabush, the Cree and Ojibway trickster figure, plays a pivotal role in both of Highway's published plays, The Rez Sisters and its sequel, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. In conjunction with analysis of Highway's political motives, the cultural weight of Nanabush has provided almost all the material for criticism on Highway's plays. With the notable exception of Helen Gilbert, Highway's critics tend to regard his plays as venues for political protest and to read his use of Nanabush as an assertion of the values of an intact and monolithic culture. Even those who recognize other strains in Highway's writing give an inordinate amount of prominence to the trickster. William Morgan's interview with Highway, for example, contains a great deal of information that has nothing to do with the trickster, including Highway's remarks on his training as a pianist and on Greek myth and classical drama. The title of the piece, however, "The Trickster and Native Theatre," proclaims these remarks to be comparatively insignificant. Perhaps it should not be surprising that many critics focus exclusively on his use of the trickster or that they treat his use of the trickster simply as a product of his politics, given Highway's material and his statements elsewhere. Such a reading, however, oversimplifies both Nanabush as a character and the plays as a whole.

Re-Creation in Canadian First Nations Literatures: "When You Sing It Now, Just like New"

IntroductionWhen you sing it like new, said Tommy Attachie of Dane-zaa songs and stories. It was the summer of 1998 and Tommy and I were cataloguing material for a CD of songs and oratory by the Dreamer Charlie Yahey. Tommy is a Dane-zaa elder and song-keeper. He told me that: All these songs, how many years ago. Makenunatane yine [songs of the dreamer, Make-nunatane], and Aledze, Maketchueson, Nachan [names of other dreamers]. How many years ago. Old prophet. When you sing it like new.Each rendition of a song from the Dreamer's tradition evokes the stories of a particular Dreamer's life and teaching. When you sing the songs of the old prophets, the stories become just like new. To use a distinction made by Dennis Tedlock (1991: 315), they are recreations rather than reproductions. Stories in Zuni oral narrative, he said (and then wrote), are interpretive performances: They exist only in the form of interpretations and it takes a multiplicity of voices to tell them. (Tedlock, 1991:338)Like song, Dane-zaa oral is a performance genre. In performance, Dane-zaa singers and storytellers recreate rather than reproduce material from their cultural tradition.Stories from First Nations oral tradition are interpretive rather than canonical. They live in the communal space shared by storyteller and listener. They live when a knowledgeable storyteller gives them voice for a particular audience. They live in a succession of creations and re-creations. They live in the breath of their tellers. Storytellers have kept their oral traditions alive by singing them now, and by so doing, making them just like new. Each telling is an interpretive re-creation rather than a recitation. Each telling realizes a shared creative authority.Storytellers now cross the borders that separate oral and written literatures (Fee and Flick, 1999). Stories in both media contextualize information by reference to shared experience. Authors and readers of First Nations literature similarly participate in dialogue by sharing experience. Communicating by crossing between orality and literacy is Indian business. First Nations writers like Thomas King and Tomson Highway vigorously exercise a sort of intellectual corollary of the Jay treaty, easily transgressing the boundaries that separate orality and literacy while remaining at home within their own country.In this paper I discuss how contemporary Canadian First Nations writers, orators and artists continue to recreate their traditions using the wide variety of settings and media now available to them. I suggest that traditions continue to be instrumental to First Nations adaptive technology. First Nations people communicate their understanding of the world in the languages of narrative, ceremony, visual representation, dialogue and oral tradition. I engage with First Nations literature in a variety of voices and media. Anthropologists have debated, nearly to the point of exhaustion, whether postmodern literary theory has anything to say to us, but have paid less attention to literature itself as ethnography. I suggest that we should be sharing theoretical as well as ethnographic authority with First Nations traditions by conversing with their narratives and narrators, rather than with the obfuscating and literarily barren language of postmodern theory (Ridington, 1999a).First nations technologyFirst Nations literature is, I suggest, part of a long tradition of what I have elsewhere called narrative technology (Ridington, 1999b). Literature is more than a pastime in First Nations tradition. It is where stories become experience and experience gives rise to stories. In the pages that follow I present examples of First Nations oral and written literatures, some of which go beyond the conventional definitions of literature as intentionally written composition. …

Contemporary American Indian writing: unsettling literature

Starting with the premise that American Indians have been colonized, Home outlines the dangers of colonial mimicry. She proposes a theory of subversive mimicry through which writers can use the language of the colonial power to subvert it and inscribe diverse First Nations voices. Drawing on select works by Thomas King, Beatrice Culleton, Ruby Slipperjack, Jeannette Armstrong, Lee Maracle, and Tomson Highway, the study also elucidates decolonizing strategies with which readers can collaborate.

Multi-Vocality and National Literature: Toward a Post-Colonial and Multicultural Aesthetic

This paper will examine, from an historical perspective, the contemporary debate (which rages both in Canada and in other multicultural states) over cultural voice and cultural ownership. It will draw on a fairly wide range of literary works by ethnic minority writers to discuss what might be called the evolution of cultural politics in Canada and in so doing suggest the profound but paradoxical impact of ethnic heterogeneity on Canadian culture. In particular it will suggest the contradictory legacy of such diverse “ethnic” writers as Maria Campbell, Tomson Highway, John Marlyn, Frank Paci, Joy Kogowa, Paul Lee and Sky Lee: a legacy that both decentres and centres, fragments and synthesizes Canadian national culture. Finally, it will suggest that conflicts between traditionalism and eclecticism which are given concrete expression in the debate over appropriation, are both inevitable and potentially productive tensions in a heterogeneous nation.