Sitting with truth, language, fences, and healing: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action and TYA in Canada

ABSTRACT

This article explores ways that theatre for young audiences artists are working with the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action. These Calls to Action (2015) ask Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians to use education and the arts to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.” Using Belarie Zatzman’s concept of “difficult knowledges” and Jill Carter’s provocative questions concerning reconciliation, this article examines four recently developed performances for young people: Minosis Gathers Hope (Alberta Aboriginal Arts and Punctuate! Theatre, Edmonton), (Mistatim (Red Sky Performance, Toronto), We Are All Treaty People (Making Treaty 7 Society and Quest Theatre, Calgary), and Biinoojiinyag Gitgaanmiwaa (WeeFestival, Toronto). During artist interviews and after attending the productions, four themes emerged that emphasize issues connected to making this kind of work in a good way: sitting with truth, careful language use, power dynamics, land and fences, and healing.

Acknowledgments

I had the opportunity to explore aspects of this article at ITYARN 2017 in the form of a paper called “Difficult Knowledge and a Sustainable Future: Making Treaty 7, “We Are All Treaty People,” and Young Audiences,” and at the Performing Cartographies Graduate Conference at York University as “Mistatim and Fences: Crossing Boundaries and Re-Mapping for Young Audiences.” I am especially grateful to the artists who gave up their time to be interviewed.

Notes

¹ Truth commissions and truth and reconciliation commissions are inquiries into wrongdoings by a government and their lasting consequences. South Africa’s post-apartheid commission (established 1996) may be the most well-known, but other truth commissions have been established in countries like Chile and Germany, and to address settler-Indigeneous relations in Australia.

² The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada published its Calls to Action in 2015. Article 62 states: “We call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, in consultation and collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal peoples, and educators, to: i. Make age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students." Article 79 states: "We call upon the federal government, in collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal organizations, and the arts community, to develop a reconciliation framework for Canadian heritage and commemoration."  Article 83 states: "We call upon the Canada Council for the Arts to establish, as a funding priority, a strategy for Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists to undertake collaborative projects and produce works that contribute to the reconciliation process.”

³ The Canada Council for the Arts, for example, has established grants that specifically support work by Indigenous artists, and others that work encourage collaboration between settler and Indigenous arts groups.

⁴ Indigenous peoples in Canada are racialized and they regularly encounter systemic barriers to participation in Canadian society. The Indigenous artists I spoke to all described racism they have experienced in Canada, and this article accepts each artist’s own use of the term as one based in their own lived experience.

⁵ Among her many roles, Christine Sokaymoh Frederick is co-founder and Artistic Director of Alberta Aboriginal Arts.

⁶ Santee Smith is founding artistic director of Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, and from the Kahnyen’kehàka (Mohawk) Nation.

⁷ Cree people of Treaty 6 Territory, where Edmonton is, and where Christine Sokaymoh Frederick lives and works, divide a circle into four quadrants: blue, white, red, and yellow. Each quadrant is associated with one of the four directions, one of the ages, with specific animals, and with certain emotions. Elders emphasize different teachings, depending on what they feel a person needs to learn. The City of Edmonton summer parks and recreation program sometimes incorporates a book called “A Week with Flying Eagle” (Gnyra 2014) that uses the Medicine Wheel as a guide https://www.edmonton.ca/activities_parks_recreation/documents/PDF/FlyingEagleBook.pdf. One elder’s more detailed description of the Medicine Wheel can be found here: http://www.fourdirectionsteachings.com/transcripts/cree.html (Lee 2012). More scholarly teachings of the Medicine Wheel can be found in Annie Wenger-Nabigon’s article, “The Cree Medicine Wheel as an organizing paradigm of theories of human development,” Native Social Work Journal, vol 7, 2010. 139–161.

⁸ In February 2015, while driving to Saskatchewan to share the creation process of Making Treaty 7 with artists there, Narcisse Blood, Michael Green, and two other artists (Lacy Morin-Desjarlais and Michele Sereda) were killed in a car accident. Losing these visionary leaders has had a significant impact on the project and on each of the artists I interviewed. Not only are they grieving, but without these leaders, it has been difficult to move the project forward. Nevertheless, all of the We Are All Treaty People workshops took place after the accident.

⁹ Andy Curtis is an actor and core member of the One Yellow Rabbit Ensemble. He has also been involved in Making Treaty 7 since its inception.

¹⁰ Kris Demeanor is an actor-musician who has performed both in Making Treaty 7 and for the young people’s adaptation We Are All Treaty People.

¹¹ Anders Hunter is a musician and member of the pow-wow drumming group Eya-Hey Nakoda.

¹² Jenn Cole (Algonquin Kiji Sibi Watershed) is a scholar and performance artist.

¹³ A poignant case in point is the short story by E. Pauline Johnson/Tekhionwake called “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” (1893) and her essay ”A Strong Race Opinion” (1892). Johnson described herself as Mohawk, and she was a strong advocate for both women and Indigenous rights. She furiously chastised writers for suggesting that her people were disappearing, or for employing reductive, stereotyping images of young Indigenous women. But she used the word “Red Girl” to describe the young woman in the story—a use of words that would be offensive in Canada today. Johnson’s poetry was published in school readers throughout Canada and people like my settler grandmother memorized her verses as part of their lessons.

¹⁴ For example, in Mistatim, Speck furiously tells Calvin that she doesn’t want to go to his school because they do not teach about anything that matters. She mocks his use of politically correct terms like “First Nations,” because it accompanies his complete lack of awareness about the residential school reality that shaped her family and who she is today.

¹⁵ Labels and terms are significant. See, for example, Tuck and Yang’s (2012) “Decolonization is not a metaphor” and Frederick’s (2018a) Huffington Post Video about Aboriginal and Indigenous. The play We Are All Treaty People makes the contentious assertion that if you live on the land in Treaty 7 territory, you are either settler or Indigenous and are subject to the treaty. Yet some residents (Métis, for example) do not see themselves as treaty people, and although some of Alberta’s Black pioneers see themselves as settlers, Vowel (2016) suggests that descendants of Black slaves should not be seen as settlers. All of these highly political words are finding their way into the way TYA scripts are written and, significantly, the way study guides are constructed.

¹⁶ Andrea Donaldson is a settler director. Besides freelance work, she is Associate Artistic Director at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

¹⁷ Tyrone Tootosis was a Plains Cree actor, storyteller, activist, culture keeper, and dancer.

¹⁸ Garret C. Smith is a Blackfoot (Peigan and Kainai) actor, who performed in Making Treaty 7 and in We Are All Treaty People.

¹⁹ Michelle Thrush is a Cree stage, film, and television actor, and was involved in Making Treaty 7 from the beginning of the project.

²⁰ Sandra Laronde is an artist, director, and activist originally from Teme-Augama-Anishinaabe in Temagami.

²¹ Nikki Loach is Artistic Director of Quest Theatre Calgary, the TYA company that partnered with Making Treaty 7 Society to make We Are All Treaty People for young audiences. She co-directed We Are All Treaty People with Troy Emery Twigg.

²² Jill Carter also adopts the term “survivance,” and attributes it to Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999, vii. Carter says that Vizenor uses the term as an antidote to myths of vanished/vanishing Indigenous people; instead, through what she calls a survivance-intervention, “Indigenous Peoples can fully realize and declare our existence in the present moment and so imagine ourselves and our nations in the futre” (Carter 433).

²³ Onespot further explained that she believes that doing a performance with a Trickster character needs to be done with care because tricksters have real power. For more information on tricksters, see, for example, Risling Baldy (2015). For more information on tricksters in theatre, see, for example, Yvette Nolan (2015).

²⁴ Leslie Katchena McCue is an arts administrator, artistic, performer, educator, and activist. Among her many roles, McCue is a resident artist educator for Young People’s Theatre in Toronto.