A Playmaking Research Journey Into Canada's North: Kangiqsujuaq

Abstract

In 2009, two white women from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (a playwright and a director/dramaturg), went to the community of Kangiqsujuaq in Nunavik, Northern Quebec, to conduct play development research for a theatre for young audiences piece called Beneath the Ice. The women were aware that the project raised complicated ethical issues, including appropriating voice and story, potential cultural and community misrepresentation, reinscribing Canadian identity myths concerning the North and Inuit people, essentializing and stereotyping identities, and possible neocolonial relationships. This is a discussion of how the artists tried to approach the project with care, respect, and artistic integrity; how the research journey augmented their perceptions of the North and Northern people; and how the playwright exposed her Southern position through the script's narrative and characters.

En 2009, dos mujeres blancas de Edmonton, Alberta, Canadá (una dramaturga y una directora/dramaturgista), viajaron a la comunidad de Kangiqsujuak, en Nunavik, al norte de Quebec, para hacer una investigación con el fin de desarrollar una obra de Teatro para Jóvenes Audiencias (TJA) llamada Bajo el hielo. Las mujeres eran conscientes de que el proyecto planteaba complicadas cuestiones éticas, como la apropiación de la voz y de la historia, la potencial distorsión cultural y comunitaria al reinterpretar los mitos de identidad canadienses de los Inuits, pobladores del norte del territorio, simplificando y estereotipando identidades y posibles relaciones neo-coloniales. En este artículo abordamos el tema de cómo las artistas trataron de aproximarse al proyecto con cuidado, con respeto e integridad artística; cómo el viaje de investigación aumentó sus percepciones del Norte y de la gente del Norte y puso de relieve cómo la dramaturga expuso su postura proveniente del Sur, a través de la narrativa y los personajes del libreto.

Notes

¹According to Brian Urquhart (personal e-mail communication, August 12, 2013), Carroll and Colmers's government contact in the town, while “Kangiqsujuaq” is the official government spelling of the community, most local people do not consider it to be phonetically correct. The municipal council uses Kangirsujuaq. Other spellings exist as well.

²The Cookie Theatre (Edmonton) has produced Beneath the Ice twice in Edmonton, and Quest Theatre (Calgary) has just finished part of a successful touring season, which will be extended to fall 2013. Although there are no firm plans in place, Colmers and Carroll are looking for ways to bring the production North and would especially like to return to Kangiqsujuaq to do a version of the play with the community there. Playwrights Canada Press will publish Beneath the Ice in an upcoming anthology and Kangiqsujuaq community members are currently being invited to give feedback on the script. Colmers is planning to translate the script into German.

³In his dissertation Barry Freeman (2010) argues that the answer to the question of whether interculturalism in theatre is possible to do ethically is “yes!” He writes, “My view is that academics have been answering ‘yes’ to this question for twenty-five years, and practitioners never answered otherwise, and that is because there are, in fact, very few people who ever believed that interculturalism was a hopelessly Occidental, imperialist enterprise. There have been deeply legitimate concerns, and those concerns are important. Nonetheless, we need to move on to learn how to write with greater precision about exactly what makes interculturalism ‘do’ what we want it to, and in turn, how we who discuss it can best observe and interpret it” (Freeman 2010, 264).

Tracy Carroll and Eva Colmers have been incredibly generous with sharing their experiences, clarifying facts and details, and helping me to prepare this article. Thanks to Antje Budde for some shared ideas

⁴ The Very Last First Time is illustrated by Ian Wallace, and as of 2010, it has enjoyed thirteen printings.

⁵In the context of debates about appropriation of voice, Knowles also reflects on debates about how to view “Native” theatre productions. He refers to Alan Filewod's “Averting the Colonizing Gaze: Notes on Watching Native Theatre,” an important essay published in 1992 by non-native academic Alan Filewod that begins with the assertion that “I can't write about native theater; all I can write about is my response to it” (Knowles 2000, 17).

⁶Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, discussed in Hulan 2002, 171.

⁷In John Ralston Saul's “Subversion in the North,” he writes that elites can live along the border and face themselves South, “but any fool can see that this is turning their backs on their own reality” (quoted in Hulan 2002, 180).

⁸Wiebe has called it the “unfulfilled myth of the North” (Western). He also explores the issues in Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (1989); River of Stone: Fictions and Memories (1995); and Discovery of Strangers (in Hulan 2002, 167).

⁹Tracy Carroll explained she and Colmers realized how ignorant they were before they could even travel. She thought the practice of collecting mussels beneath the ice was widespread and that they could simply buy a plane ticket straight north. When she discovered she would have to go to Ungava Bay, it took time before she was able to figure out which community to visit. Then she learned she had to plan the visit according to the full moon, in case they might be able to go under the ice as well (the ice was too thin because it had not been cold enough). Later, bad weather threatened to change their flight plans, and Carroll had to accept that in the North, weather, and not schedules, guided travel decisions. Just planning the trip changed Carroll's perceptions and made them more “real” than “imagined” (personal interview, March 3, 2013).

¹⁰In rhetorical contexts and in the Canadian imagination, Pupchek explains that Inuit and First Nations peoples are often “collapsed into a monolithic original indigenous population” (Pupchek 2001, 193). The way indigenous people are represented in non-native cultural expression is what Francis (1992) calls the “Imaginary Indian.”

¹¹In another neocolonial move, Ookpik was first introduced at an economic fair in Philadelphia in 1964. The organizers discussed their search on CBC television, but neglected to name the artist who recreated Ookpik. She was Jeannie Snowball of Kuujuak, the “big community” near Kangiqsujuaq (personal interview, March 3, 2013). Carroll learned that making ookpiks for Expo 67 became a significant source of revenue for Kuujuak.

¹²Ethnographer Jean L. Briggs (2009, 310–1) describes her impressions of how teasing is an essential way that Inuit elders teach social skills and other lessons to Inuit children, sometimes in “up-side down language” and “in ways that shock people in my own world”

¹³For information on versions of the Sedna story, please see Kleivan (2005).

¹⁴According to anthropologist Louis-Jacque Dorais (2005, 4), today's Inuit people see abiding by Christian morality as continuing traditional values, and as fundamental to “genuine Inuk” identity.