A Voice for Native Theatre and Literature in Canada
In the late 1990s, Native playwrights were not a mainstream topic of study in
Canadian university theatre and dramaturgy programs. I do not recall having heard of
Tomson Highway and his works when I was studying at the University of Ottawa. In fact,
testimonies about traumatizing experiences in residential schools were only beginning to
emerge at the time. After many years of silence, the voices of Canadian Native artists
were heard again in the 1960s and 70s. The author of plays, novels and children books,
Tomson Highway has contributed to the healing process of Canadian Natives and to their
re-appropriation of their own culture.
Life and Career Path
Highway was born on December 6, 1951, to caribou hunters Joe and Pelagie
Highway. He grew up on Brochet Reserve, on the tundra of northern Manitoba, close to
the eastern boundary of Saskatchewan, and in the vicinity of Nunavut and the Northwest
Territories. Historically, in remote locations like northern Manitoba, Cree trappers like
the Highway family had limited access to roads, used dog sleds as a means of
transportation during winter, and lead a nomadic lifestyle following animal migrations.
Even today, some roads in northern Canada are not accessible all year. Many Cree
families still spend time “in the bush,” pitching tents on campsites which can only be
reached by boat or small aircraft. It is in such a context that, after being suspended for a
few generations, the transmission of knowledge from elders to youth can continue to take
place in order to keep Native traditions and lifestyle alive. As we have discussed in class,
this has not always been the case for First Nations people in Canadian history.
In an article published in the winter of 2005 in Journal of Canadian Studies, Jerry
Wasserman writes that residential schools replaced day-schools for Natives because daily
teaching was considered ineffective while pupils were still in close contact with their
families, language and culture. The Indian Act of 1876 was amended in the 1920s to
make school attendance compulsory for a fixed number of years. Thus, children were
often taken from home by force. Wasserman adds that “Canada’s educational apartheid
policy lasted until 1951 when the Indian Act was amended again to allow Native children
to attend integrated public schools (. . .)” but residential schooling, however, “remained
the norm well into the 1960s” (27). As a result of this slow change, Tomson Highway
was sent to a residential school in The Pas, Manitoba, when he was six years old. He
travelled almost five hundred kilometres every year until he was 15. Following his
residential schooling, he studied Music and English literature at the universities of
Manitoba and Western Ontario (London). Subsequently, he decided to get involved in
social work with Native communities and organizations, first in Toronto, then in Ontario,
and finally across Canada. He has worked with families, penitentiary inmates, visual
artists, politicians, activists, healers, and many more.
Reaching the third decade of his life, Highway set out to write about all this
knowledge and experience gained from his people. Through his characters, he was going
to let the audience know what it felt like to have been dealt with as a “problem” by nonNative government and religious authorities. From 1986 to 1992, he has been playwright
in residence, actor, director and artistic director of what is now known as Native Earth
Performing Arts. Some of his well-known plays, such as The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips
Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, have been presented for the first time with Native Earth.
As stated on the Native Earth website, Highway was working there when the company
“instituted an annual development festival of new work called Weesageechak Begins to
Dance.” Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing won the Dora Mavor Moore Award in
1988. The author was inducted into the Order of Canada in 1994.
Thomson Highway’s work was groundbreaking because no other aboriginal artist
had done as much for Native theatre before him. Of course, oral traditions and
performing arts existed for the First Nations, but access to these riches of Canadian
culture was limited, if not nonexistent, for non-Native Canadians before the nineteen
seventies and eighties. Also, because of the systematic assimilation operated in
residential schools, generations of Natives have been alienated from traditional practices.
Before Highway started writing, very few non-Native Canadians were aware of the
challenges faced by native populations in their own country due to the residential school
solution to “the Indian problem.”
In Dry Lips, Tomson Highway shows what effects the remnants of residential
schooling can have on a group of men. The play is set on a fictional reserve, which to me
indicates that the trauma could have happened to any Native across Canada. It also makes
the reader understand how excruciatingly painful it can be for grown-ups to talk about the
physical or sexual abuse they suffered when they were children if they want to heal from
what Wasserman calls “the poison” (41) and move on. “Dry Lips finally celebrates
survival and renewal, and the need for people to deal with the consequences of their own
behaviour.” (42)
A glimpse at the Fur Queen
Tomson Highway’s father Joe was the 1951 winner of the World Championship
Dog Race. The event is part of the Northern Manitoba Trapper’s Festival held each
winter in the town of The Pas. Just like in Highway’s novel, a Fur Queen is actually
crowned during this festival held in February. The beauty pageant is real; however the
author has given a magical dimension to this trickster figure in Kiss of the Fur Queen.
There is a lexicon of words and expressions in Cree which help the reader to understand
the universe and cosmology of the novel. A parallel can be drawn between Cree not
having a system of feminine, masculine or neutral gender for each word and the varying
gender of the trickster figure from one Native story to the next. In her Quill & Quire
review of the novel, Suzanne Methot writes that “the women are one-dimensional,
assigned to roles as mother or clown or tough girl or victim;” but that it is also “a
reflection on one Cree man’s struggle to understand his place within two worlds.”(56)
-Stéphanie Roy (05627912)
Works Cited:
Methot, Suzanne. “KISS OF THE FUR QUEEN (Book).” Quill & Quire 64.9 (Sep.
1998): 56. Canadian Literary Centre. EBSCO. [Biblio. Sciences humaines],
[Sherbrooke], [QC]. 15 Nov. 2008
<http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cjh&AN=6523822&amp;
lang=fr&site=ehost-live>.
Wasserman, Jerry. "'God of the Whiteman! God of the Indian! God Al-fucking-mighty!':
The Residential School Legacy in Two Canadian Plays." Journal of Canadian
Studies 39.1 (2005): 23-58.
Native Earth Performing Arts. 2008. Envented Toronto. 15 Nov. 2008
<http://www.nativeearth.ca/en>.