Canada was a colony; Canada was a colonizer.
The duality of our nation's birth - people forcing their way onto the landscape, or just following along obliviously - has come with excruciating pain, for entire communities of people who were here first. They are still here. They are living examples of how, for one culture to be born, many others had to suffer.
It's a human story that is still unfolding, and it forms a theatrical story coming to the Prince George stage this week. This particular story, called Isitwendam, has never been seen before. Lheidli territory is the world premiere location for this all-Canadian and definitively Canadian tale of truth.
"In 2008, Stephen Harper made an apology for the residential school system, and most people who saw that interpreted it as pretty insincere, pretty cold and calculated, not heartfelt," said Jack Grinhaus, artistic director for Theatre Northwest and the co-creator of Isitwendam. "The way the apology was handled offended people all over again, especially aboriginal people. Meegwun Fairbrother (Ojibway actor-writer from the Grassy Narrow First Nation in Ontario) had this visceral, physical reaction to it, and he started writing about it and doing some performance art around it."
When this occurred, Grinhaus and Fairbrother were at York University together, grad student and undergrad respectively. Fairbrother turned to Grinhaus as a sounding board and developmental ear. It was also Fairbrother's deliberate inclusion of a white mainstream theatrical mind to balance his empirically aboriginal perspective. Fairbrother wanted all audiences to recognize truth in the play's content - for it was a play, soon enough, not just cobbled scenes.
The collaboration clicked almost immediately and it soon became a passion for both of them. Over the course of the next several years they maintained a working relationship on the piece as it evolved.
"It was actually embarrassing and shocking to me, how little I knew about residential schools and that very, very impactful and very, very recent history of Canada," Grinhaus said.
"As a guy who's Jewish, I easily understand what genocide looks like, what a holocaust means to a community of people. It was a horror to find out about what aboriginal people were put through, and how recently it all happened. And it happened in the name of you and me, it was done on behalf of Canadian voters, Canadian taxpayers and I don't know how much regular people understand about what terrible results they were going for with those schools. I was certainly ignorant about it until Meegwun showed me."
The two creators got a strong taste of what their play was capable of when they did a reading of it at a meeting of Ontario aboriginal leaders in 2012. They presented it in this raw, unfinished form to get their feedback. What they got was weeping, burning anger, triggered elders remembering their own abuses, and a surge of support to continue their work so more in Canada could understand what they were put through from generation to generation and the echoes still reverberating today.
"We put no time constraints on ourselves. We told ourselves just to work on it until we got to that point we felt it was ready. It's ready," said Grinhaus.
It's still a work in progress, though, and the way Isitwendam is built, it can bend with the times to come and with the communities in which it will be performed. It is designed to be portable and intended for the biggest and smallest communities alike. The English translation of the word is An Understanding, and that is something that evolves over time.
"We are about to do the very first public performance of Isitendam, and I could not be prouder and more excited than to have Prince George forever known as the place we held the world premier," Grinhaus said. "I'm also incredibly proud to have Meegwun meet Prince George, and our audiences get to see him in the lead. His stage and film career has been incredibly successful, he is a legitimate Canadian star, his career has been incredibly fortunate that way, but this is his passion, so he's here. He's doing it."
What kind of star is Fairbrother? He played Butterhead, the promiscuous lacrosse player, in 25 episodes of the hit TV series Mohawk Girls on OMNI/APTN. This turned into a spinoff series of his own entitled Butterhead's Guide to the Galaxy.
Science fiction fans will know him as the mixed characters Daniel Aerov, Miksa and Tulok in 15 episodes of the bio-outbreak drama series Helix on the Syfy Network in 2014 and 2015.
He also played the character Milan in the Netflix original series Hemlock Grove, a werewolf/vampire drama starring Famke Janssen and Bill Skarsgrd, based on the graphic novel and book by Brian McGreevy.
Fairbrother will be live and in person at Theatre Northwest for this one-actor powerhouse of a play. It runs Friday at 2 p.m., Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. The price of admission is pay what you can.
This is a co-production between TNW (part of their summer Innovation Series) and Bound To Create Theatre.
