Riel’s Prophecy

Dene-Metis playwright Marie Clements is equally daring in her mix of the rational and the supernatural. Her evocative play The Unnatural and Accidental Women has been described as “docu-memory.” It chronicles the serial murders of aboriginal women by a Vancouver barber, which went undetected for thirty years. “Marie took a lot of flak for the structure of that play,” says Nolan, who directed it for Native Earth in 2004. “The first act is so different from the second, and you’re not sure if the central character is really central.” The dominant image in the first act is indeed the barber and his chair, where the killings are re-enacted. Scores of women dying with blood alcohol levels as high as 0.91, and no one connects the dots, or imagines a balding sadist whose murder weapon is a few words: “Down the hatch, baby.” But the barber is not the driving force, and in the second act, when his victims gang up on him, this becomes obvious. “It’s in the title. It’s the women, all of them together, who are central,” Nolan explains. As Clements says herself in the play notes, the first act is about memory and the search for lost lives. You could say the second act is about revenge.

Accidental is hugely cathartic, a complex and crowded piece that runs on multiple layers of meaning. This multiplicity is found in all aboriginal plays to some degree, because of the commingling of Western protocols with the traditions of indigenous performance, where much is communicated through gesture, rhythm and silence. At the same time, because the work is being created by an urban diaspora of aboriginal artists from all over North (and South) America, the collaboration also embraces cultural hybridity in a way that gives new meaning to the Canadian idea of the multicultural.

To Cree actor/director Floyd Favel (Lady of Silences), the creation of a body of indigenous work that is now studied in universities, performed in Europe, and available in bookstores is a huge achievement, but he sees “playwright-driven theatre” as one specialized kind of performance. His own practice works “through ensemble, improvisation, research of theme, and development of physical actions based on personal or cultural sources.” He recently collaborated with Monique Mojica and Kuna Oswaldo DeLeón Kantule in Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way, using “visual art, mola textiles, cosmo vision, and pictographic writings of the Kuna.” The enterprise drew on the physical, intellectual, and spiritual resources of the artists, through a process Mojica describes as “transcribing, transposing, and transforming” — the latter occurring when the work finally acquires dramatic structure. “I’ve been crawling around massacre piles for more than a decade now,” she says, “and while I do not discount our victimization, I ask myself, what happens if I tell the story from another point in the circle, where I am not broken?” It is not a bridge she seeks, but a place where rupture can be reconstructed and historical memory recovered.

Native theatre has now reached a stage where it is making demands and taking liberties. It has established its own multidisciplinary tradition and collective aesthetic, and has the authority as well as the chutzpah to tug on Shakespeare’s cape. Death of a Chief does more than adapt; it appropriates Caesar. Words are altered, scenes are moved, swords are replaced with rocks, soothsayers speak Ojibwa, and Caesar’s ghost arrives with the portentous news that Portia has taken her own life.

It has been a quarter century since Native Earth was founded, when, as Highway has said, you could count the number of professional native writers in Canada on one finger. A second generation has been nurtured into being. Today there is a network of theatre organizations run by indigenous artists spanning the country, and a community of theatre artists pushing in new directions: playwright Alanis King at the Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company, pioneering work performed (sometimes entirely) in the native language; and Teme-Augama Anishinabe performer/artistic director Sandra Laronde’s Red Sky Performance, pursuing a global expression of indigenous culture.

The underside of this achievement is the extreme fragility of the edifice holding it together. Five years ago, Native Earth, the country’s oldest and presumably most stable professional aboriginal theatre company, was close to folding. Extreme overwork and low pay are common enough in the arts, but in aboriginal theatre the entire community runs on burnout. Most affecting, though, is the failure of mainstream Canadian theatre to support aboriginal work by picking up and producing native plays. After the fanfare of the 1980s, the mainstream moved on. Native theatre thrived, but did so on the margins, in studio spaces the larger companies rented out to them. Says Ric Knowles, the editor of Canadian Theatre Review, “It’s seen as patronizing native theatre, and it absolutely is patronizing.” It is also upstaged by such projects as the nac’s co-production with Native Earth, which brought serious resources to the table.

Meanwhile, Knowles observes a shift in orientation. “What I see is not a native theatre versus mainstream dynamic, but a solidarity across minoritized groups emerging. Yvette Nolan calls it the Brown Caucus, and they are all working really closely together.” This coalescence of talent and energy is marked by a diminishing interest in chasing mainstream recognition that Knowles finds healthy. De-ba-jeh-mujig Theatre Group is a case in point. Situated on the Wikwemikong Unceded Indian Reserve on Manitoulin Island, Debaj transformed itself twelve years ago, quite dramatically, as executive director Ron Berti recounts: “We spun our chairs around in the office one day and stopped looking at ourselves in relation to the mainstream.” With a $360,000 grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation to fund the revolution, they started investing in artists. Instead of training them only to lose them to Toronto, Berti put them on salary for four years, and ended up with a string of animators in communities across the North. His scheme was to develop a resource pool of artists and community projects that would be mutually sustaining. The success of Debaj is instructive for two reasons. It illustrates the value of support from aboriginal leadership, and the transformative effect of a financial leg up. It proves Minister Flaherty’s point about preparation meeting opportunity.

Louis Riel’s prophecy has seeped into popular culture, reaching far beyond its time and circumstance. Many people know it today, and some can pinpoint the moment they first heard it. For Jeannette Armstrong, it was at a performance of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe in Penticton, BC, after which Chief Dan George spoke. “At the time, I was an alien in my own country; it struck a chord that explained why there was such a silence in terms of the arts. I was stunned by it — and by the play, which was so accessible and beautiful.” Armstrong eventually discovered the words the chief used were essentially Riel’s, but the damage was done. She found validation and began a quest to connect with other artists, which eventually led her to found the En’owkin Centre, a post-secondary fine arts and language institution, in 1981.

When Yvette Nolan was growing up in Winnipeg, the prophecy seemed more like a wish. “But when I came to Native Earth, I began to see it like a self- fulfilling prophecy: ‘OK, he said it, so I can believe it.’” To her and many others, Riel was talking about what happens once you get past survival, when it is time “to revive the art of living.” It may not resonate with everyone’s history, but the prophecy keeps popping up: a walk-on part in the Turtle Gals’ recent piece, The Only Good Indian, and the hero’s parting shot in Metis Shane Belcourt’s recent film, Tkaronto. “Riel said our people would be asleep for a hundred years. Well, guess what? Time’s up. I’m done being asleep.”

According to Maria Campbell, you won’t find the prophecy in Riel’s letters and diaries, all of which she’s read. But she recognizes the words as his, and heard them first from Metis leader Jim Brady, who was active in the mid-twentieth century. Another pioneer in the Metis movement, Malcolm Norris, told her they had made a mistake back then in not working with artists. Roberta Jamieson would agree. “Artists are the visionaries. They ask us to confront the difficult questions, to dream, to rise above and move beyond. That voice is needed in government.” Which is why she instituted an arts and culture portfolio at Six Nations.