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Indigenous theatre is a medicine that facilitates the connection between…
Indigenous theatre is a medicine that facilitates the connection between the past, present, and future.
Medicine is about connection,
The Medicine of the Wheel is that it endeavours to teach us to apprehend the interconnectedness of all things.
Good medicine… makes community
Medicine, in Indian country, also refers to the four traditional medicines of many First Nations: tobacco, sweet grass, sage, and cedar.
Like everything in Indigenous worldview, they are connected to teachings, to directions.
He spoke about how every act is an act of medicine.
So if all those acts are medicine, I thought, then the act of making theatre must also be medicine.
Indigenous theatre artists make medicine by reconnecting through ceremony, through the act of remembering, through building community, and by negotiating solidarities across communities.
The act of staging these things reconnects who we are as Indigenous people with where we have come from, with our stories, with our ancestors.
The things we know and the values we hold that are manifest in the contemporary work that we put upon the stage make the Indigenous artist a conduit between the past and the future.
Ceremoy. Remembrance. Community. Survivance. Each play that I looked at could be slotted into one or more of these chapters.
Each work I looked at revealed its connection to other works, to other artists.
Instead of a chronology or a survey, I thought about writing from the centre of what I knew and letting it take me to the next place.
I thought of it as dropping stones in a pond, watching the ripples move outward from the point of entry.
I could write about Turtle Gals' work, and the ripples outward from there would carry me to Marie Clements...Michelle St. John...Margo Kane...Monique Mojica... Daniel David Moses... Keith Barker
The Summit was an act of medicine too.
Sitting together in a circle, we could trace connections to the artist, name our artistic ancestors, and bring them into the room with us. The younger artist could begin to see their position in the continuum, and be bought by the knowledge of the body of work that existed and by the understanding that they were neither alone nor starting over, but part of a plethora of tradition.
The senior artists, who so often have felt isolated and alone, could see the fruit of their labour: their works had not disappeared, but existed in the scripts, photographs, stories, memories, and bodies of their colleagues.
I wrote, emptying what I knew onto the page, remembering, writing down what I remembered so that others who came after me might remember too,
This book, then, is an effort to create a bundle where some of these things can be kept... a way to remember so much of the work that has happened, and remind us all how we are connected. This is the medicine I crave for this community of mine.