It is a sunny late afternoon in June, and up on the fifty-sixth floor of cibc’s head office building in Toronto, the bank’s youthful president, Gerry McCaughey, is presiding over the launch of the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards, musing about the contribution of native culture to Canada’s prosperity and about such role models as Mohawk Roberta Jamieson. The bank has been one of the lead sponsors for fourteen years, and Jamieson, a former chief of the Six Nations of the Grand River and provincial ombudsman of Ontario, recently took over as president of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation (naaf), which organizes the awards. McCaughey is followed by Jim Flaherty, the federal minister of finance, who also rhapsodizes about Jamieson and what naaf has accomplished. He’s known her since his Ontario days and is clearly a fan. “It’s what Canada is about,” he gushes. “This is a country of opportunity, and when preparation meets opportunity good things happen.”
Judging from the list of award recipients since 1994 — over 200 remarkable individuals, including such international stars as Haida carver Bill Reid, Mohawk rock guitarist Robbie Robertson, and Cree playwright Tomson Highway — preparation and opportunity have been meeting for some time. This wasn’t the case when these artists were young and Chief Dan George, famous for his role in the Dustin Hoffman film Little Big Man, was the only aboriginal artist mainstream Canada had heard of. Less widely known was the chief’s historic appearance in the original production of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, one of the plays that launched the independent theatre movement in Canada. Written by Ukrainian Canadian George Ryga, Rita Joe is the story of a young aboriginal woman who meets violent death in the city. It is an utterly contemporary and Canadian tale — one taking place on a regular basis a few streets over from the Vancouver Playhouse, where the play premiered in 1967.
Highway puts mythology at the heart of his project. “The mythology of a people is the articulation of the dreamworld of that people,” he writes. “Without that dreamlife being active in all its forms — from the most extreme beauty to the most horrific and back — the culture of that people is dead.” Plays are but one manifestation of this dynamic, crafted “to fit, snugly and comfortably, the medium of the stage.”
While Highway remains the best-known aboriginal playwright in Canada, he wasn’t a lone phenomenon. Alongside him was a generation of superbly talented artists, dancers, singers, and storytellers who simply set up shop, started crafting plays, training the actors, and organizing the companies to produce them. One of them was Cree/Saulteaux actor/director Margo Kane (Confessions of an Indian Cowboy), who similarly saw her work in terms of the revitalization of indigenous community. “We were very conscious about what we had to do, what theatre could do, and what we could do as artists to contribute to our communities’ well-being,” she says.
In Vancouver, Kane created Full Circle First Nations Performance as a place where local aboriginal artists could congregate to “train together, develop a vocabulary together and a way to work based on teachings we’d learned.” These included the concept of collaborative creation, where performances evolve through the interaction between actors, dancers, and singers, and scripts are treated as works-in-progress. In Toronto, Highway helped establish Native Earth Performing Arts and came on as artistic director in 1986, focusing on the development of writers. Collaboration with non-native companies was proving difficult, as demonstrated by the turbulent partnership of writer Maria Campbell (Halfbreed), a Metis (she uses the term Michif ), and playwright Linda Griffiths (Age of Arousal) in the creation of the play Jessica. (The two women documented their Manichean struggle with racism in The Book of Jessica.) Jessica underscored the importance of building native theatre from the inside out. “Like the original company of Rita Joe, the creators of Jessica were empathetic but at the core not Native,” writes Algonquin playwright Yvette Nolan (Annie Mae’s Movement), Native Earth’s current artistic director.
This February, Nolan took Death of a Chief, an aboriginal adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, to the National Arts Centre, in Ottawa. Death pares down and reconstructs the play, moving from Rome to “Rome, Ontario”: chief gets elected, gets too big for his britches, gets overthrown. The play has been in development for three years at this point, and some thirty artists have had a hand in it in the course of three workshops. Guided by Nolan and Shakespearean voice teacher Kennedy C. MacKinnon, the artists delved into the play, identifying points of connection with metaphor and plot, and then negotiated a translation into aboriginal terms. Their point of departure was a single line spoken by Brutus, “Th’abuse of greatness is when it disjoins / Remorse from power,” a kernel of truth where the Western and the indigenous could meet.
But what to do with all those swords? Or Caesar’s ghost coming to tell Brutus he’d see him again at Philippi? “In our cultures, ghosts don’t come with so little to say,” Nolan says with a smile. The retelling introduces the female point of view, along with some gender reversal: Caesar is played by Kuna-Rappahannock playwright Monique Mojica (Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots), and her husband, Calpurnius, by Cree actor and Corner Gas star Lorne Cardinal. This instantly sexualizes the plot and underscores the blind capacity of power to corrupt anyone who messes with it. Death of a Chief cuts close to the contemporary bone.
The first challenge of native theatre will always be that of relating an aboriginal world view to an outside (and largely non-aboriginal) audience, drawing on tradition while respecting it. Okanagan writer Jeannette Armstrong understands this tug-of-war between city and reserve. “It’s like a split in the road. The decision to try to survive, to get to present the work and find an audience leads to other decisions and compromises.” How far do you go to fit into an alien art form? How far can you hope to bend it to your way? Even if there is an affinity between the oral tradition and theatre, they are profoundly different enterprises. Western drama, for example, demands a central character (which neither of Tomson Highway’s hits possesses) and some sort of conflict. The latter is a problem if you come from a culture where only two activities permit it: hockey and lacrosse, as Delaware playwright Daniel David Moses will tell you: “I resisted the imposition of naturalistic forms on our oral culture, and this is why my work uses ceremonial gestures as a way of creating moments when contact is made and you break down the fourth wall.” Moses is known for his reliance on poetics and epiphany rather than plot. He searches for unusual ways into stories, such as in Almighty Voice and His Wife, where the dead hero returns in whiteface so the story can unfold in another realm.
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