Keith
Barker. This is How We Got Here. Playwrights
Canada Press, 2017. 104pp. ISBN: 9781770918221.
https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Books/T/This-Is-How-We-Got-Here
Tara
Beagan. In Spirit. Playwrights Canada Press, 2017. 64pp.
ISBN: 9781770918061.
https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Books/I/In-Spirit
Cliff
Cardinal. Huff &
Stitch. Playwrights Canada
Press, 2017. 120pp. ISBN: 9781770917460.
https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Books/H/Huff-Stitch
Yvette
Nolan. Medicine Shows: Indigenous
Performance Culture. Playwrights Canada Press, 2015. 184pp. ISBN: 9781770913455.
https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Books/M/Medicine-Shows
Yvette
Nolan. The Unplugging. Playwrights
Canada Press, 2014. 80pp. ISBN: 9781770911321.
https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Books/T/The-Unplugging
Jean
O'Hara, editor.
Two-Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous
Performances. Playwrights Canada Press, 2013. 160pp. ISBN: 9781770911840.
https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Books/T/Two-Spirit-Acts
Donna-Michelle
St. Bernard, editor.
Indian Act: Residential School Plays. Playwrights
Canada Press, 2018. 392pp. ISBN: 9781770919143.
https://www.playwrightscanada.com/Books/I/Indian-Act
Both North and South of the Great
Lakes, literary critics and thinkers such as Julian NoiseCat and Madeline Sayat
have been hailing a "New Native Renaissance." Yet, while whitestream U.S.
theatres have recently been waking up to Indigenous playwrights such as Larissa
FastHorse, Mary Kathryn Nagle, and DeLanna Studi, play development, production,
and publication in Canada has long been ahead of their southern counterparts,
as evidenced by the output of Playwrights Canada Press. Even so, the press's
recent publications particularly demonstrate the variety and strength of
current First Nations, Inuit, and Métis playwrights.
Medicine
Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture, by
Métis playwright / dramaturg / director Yvette Nolan, provides a critical
counterpart to these plays, demonstrating the web of interconnections between
artists, development processes, and production companies as a fractal of "the
interconnectedness of all things." After all, as Nolan writes, Indigenous
theatre calls attention to connection, and reconnects
"through the act of remembering, through building community, and by negotiating
solidarities across communities" (1-3). As Nolan draws upon her prodigious
memory as a longtime participant and former Artistic Director of Native Earth
Performing Arts, she navigates the web of genealogy of young actors who become
playwrights, young playwrights who become leaders, and transcultural failures
whose honesty encourages new and more informed attempts. Her approach
contextualizes contemporary dramas by Indigenous playwrights within the
playwrights' own cultural systems, but also acknowledges both the incredible
diversity within the "Indigenous" category, and the diversity of dramaturgical
methods employed by contemporary Indigenous playwrights. Nolan's critical
overview of contemporary Indigenous drama eludes some of the stereotypes common
in a settler lens, instead organizing her chapters around concepts such as
"survivance," "remembrance," "ceremony," "making community," and "the eighth
fire": this last title designating Nolan's vision of the next task as
reciprocal and informed collaboration between Indigenous and arrivant artists.
Nolan exemplifies her description of the Indigenous artist as "a conduit
between the past and the future," and both past and future loom large in these
recent plays (Nolan Medicine Shows 3).
For instance, Two-Spirit
Acts: Queer Indigenous Performance, edited by Jean O'Hara, includes new
solo work by Spiderwoman co-founder Muriel Miguel (Kuna / Rappahannock), as
well as by Kent Monkman (Cree), and Waawaate Fobister (Anishinaabe).
O'Hara's introduction and Tomson Highway's foreword, "Where is God's Wife? Or
is he gay?," delineate the existence of queer
Indigenous community, and encircle that community (or, more accurately,
communities) within the broader community of Indigeneity. Miguel's Hot 'n' Soft begins with a quilt
backdrop, like many of Spiderwoman's performances, but quickly departs into a
romp of lesbian discovery, where a hairy woman's body reminds Miguel of bored
Coyote, and female Coyote sends the performer back to a giggling telephone
flirtation. Miguel simultaneously embraces her role as Indigenous theatrical
elder and refuses to let that role predict her body or her life. Meanwhile,
Kent Monkman's diva drag persona Miss Chief Eagle Testickle dons stilettos and
feathers to directly address enduring misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples
by holding a Séance with painters
Eugène Delacroix, Paul Kane, and George Catlin, where she first eviscerates
them and then invites the audience to "bring back" the "dance to the Berdache,"
or Two-Spirit, in club-track remix. In Taxonomy
of the European Male, as the title suggests, Miss Chief flips the script to
reveal the absurdity of supposedly scientific racialization.
As for the more recent past, of course the dominance of the
"Truth and Reconciliation" process that shadows all recent discussions of
Indigeneity in what is currently known as Canada spills into Indigenous
theatrical creations. After all, while Canada's Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), convened as a result of the Indian Residential Schools
Settlement Agreement of 2007, "concluded" in 2015 with a lengthy report,
Indigenous playwrights have long been grappling with the ongoing colonial
legacies of the residential school system. Nolan calls the school system "an
identifiable villain with a contained timeline," not separate from the larger
effects of colonization, but more "obviously intentional and institutionalized"
(Nolan Medicine Shows 13). Judging by
the recent publications of Playwrights Canada Press, however, recent plays by
First Nations, Inuit, and Métis playwrights make those connections between
current issues and intergenerational trauma, particularly from residential
schools, even more explicitly.
Theatre has often played a role in the difficult processes
of restorative justice instigated by TRCs around the world. Art has the
advantage of taking multiple approaches to testimony, as well as experimenting
with multiple reactions, as Jane Taylor has noted in reflecting upon her play Ubu and the Truth Commission, created
with Handspring Puppets for the South African TRC. Even within the collection Indian Act: Residential School Plays, edited
by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, styles and approaches run a wide gamut: from
Nolan's Dear Mr. Buchwald, both a
multimedia documentary of Nolan's mother's life and a bitterly blunt account of
their family's struggle to receive her survivor settlement; to Michael
Greyeyes' (Plains Cree) Nôhkom,
another first-person, yet lyrical effort to recover what he can of his
grandmother's story from scraps and memories; to Tara Beagan (Ntlaka'pamux)'s They Know Not What They Do, where
characters both testify as elders and dramatize their early childhood
experiences; to the naturalistic young group casts of Larry Guno (Nisga'a)'s Bunk #7, set in a residential school in
the 1960s, and Curtis Peeteetuce
(Cree)'s kihēw, set in 2007 in
the shell of an old school, where teens find more than they bargained for
looking for ghosts; to the most naturalistic and yet stunningly open-ended
two-person confrontation between former student and former teacher, God and the Indian, by Drew Hayden
Taylor (Ojibway).
God
and the Indian encapsulates many pitfalls and doubts
inevitable in a reconciliation process that relies upon memory and the trauma
inherent in describing trauma. His title refers to the play's only two
characters: a boarding school survivor who traces all the pain of her life to
her abuse at school, and a now-celebrated priest whom she believes to be her
abuser. At the same time, the title points to the duo's imbrication in a huge
system and a long history of church-driven cultural genocide. Taylor skillfully
draws the audience into the survivor's hope that truth will lead to
reconciliation and peace; instead, as the priest insists that it wasn't him,
she starts to question her own memories, and we as audience start to question
whether any resolution could be possible. We become complicit in the desire for
story patterns and tidy endings, for reconciliation at the expense of
restorative justice. Taylor leaves us as unsettled as history.
Tara Beagan and Yvette Nolan's contributions to the
anthology exemplify the power of multimedia technologies in performing
archives. In They Know Not What They Do, Beagan's
actors play their characters both as small children and as aged survivors - except
for the children who did not live to age. The cruelties of inspections, hair
cutting, stern incomprehensible speeches, punishment, and suicide play mostly
through multimedia images. Although moments of theatrical beauty intercut these
horrors (notably an aurora borealis springing forth from a suitcase), the
play's tone remain elegiac from the children's first
day of school through their testimony. As one says, "Seems unfair to be sitting
here telling my story when so many never will. But... hopefully our telling will
honor them somehow... Those schools did what they were supposed to do. Took us
from home... For good" (St. Bernard 157-9). Beagan's
stage directions actually include the directive "hammer home some archival
images," and her play ends with "Harper's apology on sardonic loop"; after the
testimonies of what can never be undone or returned, the repeated "And we are
sorry. And we apologize" rings bitterly (St. Bernard 159). Within the students'
survival, though, and their telling, live their ancestors' stories. What they
need, what these plays provide, is the "string to build [their] stories on"
(St. Bernard 152).
Meanwhile, Nolan makes use of projections to share documents
and photographs in counterpoint with her letter to the lawyer who worked with
her family to secure her mother's settlement as a residential school survivor.
Commissioned by a graduate law students' association from Native Earth
Performing Arts, the spoken letter draws attention to the years-long process of
securing the settlement, and to the system that creates even greater obstacles
to families with fewer resources, a system that continues to make money "off
the First People of this land, still, after all this time, all the while
complaining that we should just get over it, pull ourselves up by our
bootstraps, and stop being a drain on the resources" (St. Bernard 353-4). It's
not about the money, Nolan's speaker insists, she's given away her share, and
yet the money exemplifies the ongoing exploitation of her family. Meanwhile,
the archival projections also insist that it's about the people: photographs of
her mother insist upon her unique humanity, from her teenage years to her young
wedding to her status card to her young children to her grown children. The
projections also allow educational text to intersperse with the reading of
words from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, summarizing the TRC
process and its findings, and the four principles for "basis for a renewed
relationship: recognition, respect, sharing, and responsibility." Nolan's play, and the anthology, end with "The Road Forward" (also a
chapter heading in Medicine Shows).
The Road Forward, Nolan's projected photos insist, includes Indigenous people,
living and working and being in the present in all their variety. As her stage
directions celebrate, "there are so many of them" (St. Bernard 355-6).
Like many composers in a non-mainstream, or non-whitestream
community, Indigenous playwrights have to attend to insider and outsider
audiences - or make an intentional decision to let non-Indigenous audiences not
understand. Nolan describes the course of Indigenous art about the residential
school system as a "long and often painful process of education for a Canadian
public that was largely oblivious of its existence" (Nolan, Medicine Shows 14). The plays included
in Indian Act anticipate a spectrum
of audiences, working toward healing and community building all the way around
the eighth fire. Editor St. Bernard highlights the international
responsibilities of settler-colonial governments by including the UN
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Article 11, in the collection's
appendix. In this context it serves as both documentation of Indigenous rights
and a call for settler readers to continue their education and work for equity
beyond the limits of the official TRC process. The title, meanwhile, refers to
the Indian Act of 1884 that created the residential school systems. The titular
play on words gives agency to the Indigenous actors but also calls up the long
stage tradition of redface, acts of representation whose stage popularity
affect the treatment of real Indigenous people in daily life. Editor Donna-Michelle
St. Bernard prefaces the collection with a thoughtful meditation on what she
didn't learn in the Canadian school system as a young immigrant, what she
didn't know even as an adult theatre practitioner, yet what she now sees continuing in, for example, "the short life and tragic death
of Tina Fontaine while in government care," proving that "while the language of
the Indian Act policies have been revised and redacted, the institutional
culture they represent is implicit, pervasive." As a non-Indigenous ally, St.
Bernard wields her "we" gloriously, speaking to her fellow arrivant Canadians
(and by extension North Americans), "Maybe we can all excuse ourselves for what
we weren't told, as a child nation. Also, maybe it's time to grow up, to take
responsibility... What happened here is part of our story, a part that is
context to all other struggles in this place" (St. Bernard x-xi). She
acknowledges survivors' right to their silence, and the generosity of their
testimony and their research. In a "dialogue" preface, Daniel David Moses
(Delaware / Tuscarora) declares that the collection's plays can "show us how to
heal" (St. Bernard vii).
Melanie J. Murray (Métis) particularly connects contemporary
lives with historic injustice by beginning with a protagonist who doesn't even
know her Indigenous ancestry. In A Very
Polite Genocide or The Girl Who Fell to Earth, Josie has an unexpected
emotional response when giving her university research paper on "The
Devastation of the Métis"; her slow process of reconnecting with her birth
family parallels her grandfather's reticence to lead as an elder, and in
overlapping time periods, her grandparents' childhood at residential schools, her
grandfather's post-war PTSD, her grandmother's addiction after losing her
children, her uncle's sexual abuse and depression. Josie's character embodies
generational isolation, but as Yvette Nolan notes, the play "makes... a
community... that has been shattered and dispersed by residential schools, the
1960s scoops, and internalized racism born of shame and dislocation." The time
travel, or time-mashup, works with Josie to "make the connections to become
whole again," until in "the final scene of the play, the playwright makes a
community of a group that has until now not known its connection... three generations are connected, listening to one of the
oldest stories" (Nolan Medicine Shows
83-4, 87). With the help of a Rougarou, "a shape-shifting supernatural creature
that keeps nudging the reluctant student to look at the things she has been
avoiding or denying all of her life," Josie unites pieces of self, pieces of
community, and pieces of stories, "making connections about her own history and
the history of the country in which she lives" (Nolan Medicine Shows 86, 84). Josie's and other characters' repeated
insistence that they "don't know" and aren't up to the task dramatizes the need
for everyone to begin somewhere in grappling with the past and its legacy.
Therefore, Murray's contribution to Indian Act bridges to other crises to which North American settler
governments are slowly waking up, such as the decades-long crisis of Missing
and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People, a movement that
has done much awareness-building through art and online with the hashtags
#MMIW, #MMIWG, and #MMIWG2S. Tara Beagan, who attends to child characters in
her boarding school play, gives all of her wrenching drama In Spirit to direct address by a "fictionalized" murdered girl
"inspired by all too many true stories" (Beagan iii). In Spirit's epigraph connects #MMIWG2S to history of cultural
genocide, declaring, "A missing child is an unquantifiable symptom of the greed
and corruption of society... This play is for those children who bear the
weight of the ways in which this world has failed them" (Beagan i). In Spirit provides an exquisite example
of finding broad applicability through the specific. Beagan uses Ntlaka'pamux
words, and notes that the play is meant to honor a specific loss, with the
permission of the lost girl's mother, but she changes names and identifying
details. Here again, video and sound augment the raw simplicity of solo
performance - sometimes providing flashbacks of happier memories, sometimes
demonstrating the distortion that young Molly experiences as she tries, post-mortem,
to remember what happened to her. Molly speaks directly to her audience, but
doesn't know why they are there any more than she knows where she is. Her "Do
you see me? Feels like you're looking about me. But not really at me" speaks to
the potential voyeurism of the audience relationship as well as the way that
individual lives dissolve into the statistics (Beagan 6). Molly literally
pieces together her smashed bike while telling stories about her family and her
dog and her friends and her birthday - the kind of stories a
not-quite-thirteen-year old girl tells, about her plans for holidays and how
she and her best friend will live in a house together when they grow up. Molly
doesn't realize that the bike she's reassembling is her own, but bits of the
story of the man in the truck who asked her questions keep surfacing to
puncture her young happiness. She tries to hide from sounds of her attack but
keeps finding the bravery to pick up the bike pieces and tell her strange quiet
adult audience about how her friend with brothers taught her to "become dead
weight" to stop somebody from fighting them. Molly, however, knows more than
one wants a not-quite-thirteen-year-old to know. She knows that "That's only if
someone's worried about getting in trouble... . Some people don't care about
trouble. That's when you have to be really, really, smart and brave" (Beagan
15). Consequently, the horrific reality of GIRL's death - inevitable as any
plot - softens enough to withstand its telling, but also lands all the more painfully
because we see it land on her, a girl we now know. As Molly spins her tales of
family and friends, she illustrates Nolan's point about community. The loss of
Molly will resonate through a long network. Molly's spirit, though, draws upon
that network in death just as she did in life: just as she dealt with racist
teachers by laughing about how adults can be dumb, just as she notes that dogs
and people only grow up to be mean if someone was mean to them, just as she
cried hardest when she realized that each of her run-over dogs were run over by
people who chose to leave them. Remembering how her Yuh'yuh (Grannie) told her
that everything has spirit, and that a funeral would help her let go of her
dog, even though she was sick of funerals, remembering how they told stories
about the dog, and then the wind "went shwushhhhup the trees," that "Yuh'yuh
said it's [his] spirit going. Freefree," and then she went about her daily
routine missing him but that each day got easier (Beagan 36). That understanding,
that reassurance that Molly's spirit gives back to her audience, that
validation for the telling of stories of the lost, brings Molly to recognize
her bike, and to tell what happened to her, even to see her body. On the video
screen, Molly remains "lifeless on the ground... as live Molly walks away"
(Beagan 39). Beagan's play manages a tone both tender
and brutal, funny and childlike and devastating. It allows Molly, standing
fictionally in for so many real lost children, to be a child, and to craft a
full life in stories even in the shadow of her death. It provides a ceremony
for letting go, but its last sounds, of the truck on gravel, refuse to suggest
any false resolution for an ongoing epidemic.
Similarly, Cliff Cardinal's dually-published
solo pieces, Huff & Stitch, allow
their young characters their childhood, drawing strength from the space of the
play to... well, play. By speaking
directly to the audience, Molly and Huff's
Wind and Stitch's Kylie conjure what is lost, what is constantly being lost, what
could have been and could be salvaged, protected. Yet where Beagan maintains a
mostly gentle touch, Cardinal thrusts his audiences into a brittle, devouring
world. Stitch begins at Kylie's job
acting in porn videos; more specifically, it begins with Kylie proclaiming,
"You're sick. ... But the ugly truth is that I need you. ... I won't be asking much
of you. Just do what you always do. Watch" (Cardinal 59). Although she
addresses an internet audience, she literally addresses the theatre audience,
who see behind the scenes of her life, but also must watch all of her pain, her
addiction, her struggle for custody of her daughter, her dangerous and
humiliating jobs, and her personified persistent yeast infection. Huff also "implicates" the audience in
its first moments, as the lights come up on a young man with his hands tied
behind his back and a plastic bag over his head; he asks audience members to
help him remove the bag, ensuring that from the beginning, the audience must
face the consequences of their own lack of action.
Like Beagan, Cardinal worked as an actor before writing, and
his early experiences included working with Nolan and with Native Earth
Performing Arts. He had performed in the successful one-man piece Tales of an Urban Indian, and Nolan
notes that his Huff, written ten years later, echoes that earlier "story of
survival" but with "even more harrowing" stakes (Nolan Medicine Shows 28). Once again, the young protagonist Wind, who
stops his own suicide attempt in the first scene, has his own very specific
memories to share, but once again his life is entangled in historical and
social forces. Even the kids on the bus know that "the statistical rate of
suicide for First Nations living on the reserve is the highest in the world,"
so Wind knows that his mother's and brother's suicides connect to the problems
of their school system, his other brother's Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and sexual abuse,
his father's violence, and all three brothers' huffing of gas (Cardinal 26).
Wind assigns the audience the role of "imaginary friends who exist as a result
of self-asphyxiation, gas huffing, Lysol, or a combination of all three" (Nolan
Medicine Shows 29). Nolan admits that
Stitch must be driven by a magnetic
performer in order for its power to cohere. The same can be said of Huff, but its rhythms and shifts between
roles, its understanding of spare production flexibility and audience
interaction speaks to Cardinal's deep knowledge of shared emotion and energy. Perhaps
it's Cardinal's time inhabiting Huff as
performer that yields such a muscular, lean, charming yet brutal portrait of
the play's resilient boys. Cardinal has said that he wants Huff "to inspire hope, not hopelessness" (Nolan Medicine Shows 30). While the play's
dark content makes hope feel unlikely, the energy and love of a great solo
performer can bring it back, as can the brothers' relationship as described by
Wind. Huff's scared gift was that he could "make people feel love just by
blowing. Like this: Whooosh," and at the end of the play, when Wind seems once
more lost beyond all hope, the whooosh returns to him, and he removes his
handcuffs and the plastic bag, choosing hope, inspired by brother's memory
preserved in story (Cardinal 7). Even with only one body onstage, Indigenous
storytellers have long known how to embody community.
Nolan's own play, The
Unplugging, and Keith Barker's This
is How We Got Here present survivor stories as well, but in some senses
more whimsically. In dialogue that hews between realism and fable, these two
plays dramatize community more than identifiable issues or identities. The Unplugging presents a
post-apocalyptic, post-electric landscape; its co-protagonists, two women in
their fifties who've been exiled from their community because of their age,
learn to live on their own through memories of grandmother's teachings, and
then must decide whether to share their knowledge with their banishers. The
characters' Indigeneity emerges in small pieces, like remembering how to set a
trap, then remembering the word for rabbit. Yet its humor, its validation of
elders and long memory, and its concern with relationships emphasize Nolan's points
about making community. As Rachel Ditor's introduction points out, the play
addresses both "small, domestic negotiations between people and the vast
landscapes of our negotiations with nature... prompt[ing] us to think about our
relationship to the land, our relationship to knowledge and how we acquire it
and to the construction and nurturing of community" (Nolan Unplugging iii). In Medicine
Shows, Nolan quips that she wrote The
Unplugging "to see if [she] was still a playwright" as she left her
administrative home. She identifies its "starting point [as] an Athabaskan
story, which was told by Velma Wallis and published in 1993 as Two Old Women, about two women who are
exiled from their community and must remember their traditional knowledge in
order to survive" (Nolan Medicine Shows
88). While the original was set in precontact times, Nolan's resetting
continues to think into the time of the eighth fire.
Barker's This is How
We Got Here contains even fewer overt markers of Indigeneity, yet it too
stages remaking of community as survivance. In fact its title could easily
match the last chapter of Nolan's essays, This Is How We Go Forward. Barker (Algonquin Métis) follows up his
first play, The Hours That Remain, which
dramatized #MMIWG stories, with another dexterously woven exploration of
trauma's repercussions on a family in This is How We Got
Here. As the anniversary of their son Craig's suicide approaches, a family
fights the disintegration of their relationships with each other in scenes that
alternate with a tale of a storytelling fox who goes in search of his own
forgotten story. The fox interludes both parallel and ground the swirl of human
anger and loss, connecting to happy memories of Craig's childhood books and to
a present-day fox who lingers in the backyard, who
Craig's mom believes to be his spirit. The first scene opens with Craig's
father and uncle looking for Craig's mom, who has gone missing. Only as the
following scenes jump back and forth does the exposition unfold, how the
mystery of Craig's suicide one year before sent fractures of blame and grief
between his parents and their best friends. The final scene returns to the
search but finds Craig's mom watching the body of the fox in the road. As the
parents plan to bury the fox, they "lean into each other" again, and as the
lights fade, the audience hears Craig's voice for the last and only time, his
last voicemail message, a "slice of life, casual, everyday message" that his
mom has been grasping as tightly as she grasps a mysterious egg brought to her
by the fox (Barker 86). While the play resonates with the pain of broken
connections and bad medicine, it also takes time for spirit, and for humor,
notably when Craig's aunt tries to shoo away the fox, yelling
AND
JUST BECAUSE I'M YELLING AT YOU DOESN'T MEAN I THINK YOU ARE WHO SHE SAYS YOU
ARE, 'CAUSE YOU'RE NOT! Yeah yeah yeah, tilt your head, you smug little... What
do you want from me? ... there's nothing left. You've
taken it all away, and now it feels like... like I loved you too much... I am so mad
at you and I have never been mad at you in my whole life ever. ... WELL DON'T
JUST STAND THERE, SAY SOMETHING, WOULD YOU? ... Yeah, you're nothing but a fox
(Barker 70).
While Barker doesn't identify his characters as Indigenous,
he writes from intimate knowledge of the youth suicide epidemic in Indigenous
communities, and like Beagan and the playwrights in Indian Act, Barker creates ceremony of collective grief in the name
of collective healing. The play's ceremony reminds us that we all carry stories
of each other, as Barker's fox story elaborates:
And
when the sun returned the next morning, life continued as it always had, and
stories
continued as they always do. For you see, the fox did not understand that our
stories
are not just ours to tell. Other people tell them too, for our stories live in
the
people
around us. And when we lose our way, when we feel like we can't remember our
own
story anymore, and that it might be coming to an end - that everything is going
to
be
okay: because when we can't tell our own story, the people in our lives tell
our story for us. (Barker 80)
In past decades, Nolan found that whitestream audiences
complained about feeling sad and guilty during Indigenous plays, and the few
successful plays seemed "to be reinforcing the same theme: First Nations are
damaged, and even within our own communities, we cannot heal." Yet these recent
plays offer a way forward indeed: telling the stories together, around the
eighth fire.
Although Indigenous stories and people are so much more than
traumas, Nolan gives the TRC, along with Idle No More, some credit in starting
the discussion about the relationship between Indigenous communities and
settler and arrivant communities "to work together to achieve justice, to live
together in a good way." She declares that "Indigenous
performance offers one of the most generative means for Indigenous people and
Canadians to explore their shared history and work towards some kind of
conciliation" (Nolan Medicine Shows 117,
17). With Nolan's historical and conceptual guide, these recent plays offer all
of North America a remarkable reading and viewing list.
Jennifer
Shook, Oklahoma State University
Works
Cited
NoiseCat,
Julian Brave. "Tommy Orange and the New Native Renaissance," The Paris Review, June 29, 2018.
Sayet,
Madeline. "Native Women Rising," American Theatre Magazine. April 2018.
Taylor,
Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission. University of Cape Town. Press, 1998.