Daniel David Moses: Spoken and Written Explorations of His Work

By Guernica

This collection is a compelling examination and discussion of the work of Indigenous writer Daniel David Moses. Including pieces by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, storytellers, playwrights, academics and artists, participating in narratives, writing and dialogues about Moses and his work, the book is at once engaging, grounded in comparative analysis and forceful. Among the contributors: Don Perkins, Randy Lundy, Kristina Fagan Bidwell, Rob Appleford, Maria Campbell, Brenda Macdougall, Greg Scofield, Jo-Ann Episkenew, Helen Gilbert, David Brundage and Tracey Lindberg. In addition, Daniel David Moses contributed his radio playMy Grandfather's Face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Guernica
• Release date: Apr 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781550719499

Book preview

Table of Contents

PREFACE: SAYING ‘YES’ TO THIS PROJECT

Tracey Lindberg

INTRODUCTION: THE METHOD AND CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK

David Brundage

THE EARLY YEARS OF DANIEL DAVID MOSES

David Brundage

THE POETRY AND PLAYS OF DANIEL DAVID MOSES: AN OVERVIEW

Don Perkins

A VISIT TO SIX NATIONS GRAND RIVER: DANIEL DAVID MOSES AND ‘HERE’

David Brundage

ALL HIS RELATIONS: AN AFTERNOON WITH MR. DAVID MOSES, MRS. BLANCHE MOSES, AND THEIR SON DANIEL

David Brundage

CYCLES OF LIFE IN DANIEL DAVID MOSES’ DELICATE BODIES

Kristina Fagan Bidwell

SO WHAT’S INDIAN ABOUT YOUR POETRY, ANYWAY?

Randy Lundy

INTERVIEWING DANIEL DAVID MOSES: 1999

David Brundage

A RIDE LIKE MISS JOHNSON’S ‘WILD CAT’: A NEW POEM

Daniel David Moses

SPIRITED BORDER CROSSINGS: DANIEL DAVID MOSES AS TRANSLATOR IN COYOTE CITY, CITY OF SHADOWS, AND BIG BUCK CITY

Tracey Lindberg

INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT DREW HAYDEN TAYLOR ON DANIEL DAVID MOSES AND COYOTE CITY

Tracey Lindberg

ENLIGHTENING SHADOWS: EXPOSING THE CITY IN DANIEL DAVID MOSES’ ‘CITY PLAYS’

Don Perkins

DANIEL DAVID MOSES: GHOSTWRITER WITH A VENGEANCE

Rob Appleford

IDENTITY, IDENTIFICATION, AND AUTHENTICITY IN ALMIGHTY VOICE AND HIS WIFE: A ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION

Maria Campbell, Tracey Lindberg, Brenda

Macdougall, Greg Scofield

Living and Dying with the Madness of Colonial Policies: The Aesthetics of Resistance in Almighty Voice and His Wife

Jo-Ann Episkenew

Black and White and Re(a)d All Over Again: Indigenous Minstrelsy in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Theatre

Helen Gilbert

Kanakyologotechnia: ‘King of the Raft’ and the Roots of Canadian Fusion

David Brundage

INTERVIEWING DANIEL DAVID MOSES: 2015

Tracey Lindberg

MY GRANDFATHER’S FACE: A RADIO PLAY

Daniel David Moses

DANIEL DAVID MOSES: BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CONTRIBUTORS

Preface: Saying ‘Yes’ to this Project

Tracey Lindberg

This work spans a decade of development, and the use of terms by people to discuss Daniel’s work situates the writer more than the reader, at times. We have neither asked for nor required uniformity in terminology nor asked authors to define what they mean in using the terms. All are well intended and understood to be the most reflective and respectful choices made by the author. For this reason, readers will note that authors write using terminology that differs. This book includes references to Odawa, Indigenous, Aboriginal, Native and Indian peoples. All usages are meant with good intent.

This collection is one which we enjoyed researching, reading, gathering and participating in as a Centre. The Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge and Research (represented in this work by Maria Campbell, Priscilla Campeau and Tracey Lindberg) decided to participate in the work because of our respect and admiration for Daniel David Moses. While his writing is probably what he is best known for, we also acknowledge and celebrate his kindness, his generosity to the arts community and his role as an activist.

People know that Daniel is so very smart—and his words dance with electricity and envelop with warmth. As a playwright, it might be said, he makes us think. As a poet, he makes us feel. What readers might gather from the words in these pieces is the impact that he has had and continues to have on the development of playwriting and poetry as art; what we also know is that he is an advocate and activist of quiet persuasion. The collection is notable because of what Daniel does: inform, entertain, educate and agitate. It is also special because of what he does not do: parse, particularize, or preach. Daniel’s work is tied to land and personhood in ways which are emotionally and sensorially engaging. We are so humbled to have been asked to work with the materials and with David as co-editor, author, participants and copy editors and hope that the work allows more people to find, access and enjoy the work of Daniel David Moses. Elder Campbell told me at the start and at the end of this work: Daniel is one of the most kind people I know. I hope that readers get a sense of this as they wade in and enjoy the discussions with him and his family and about his work.

Tracey Lindberg, July 2015

Introduction: The Methods and Contents of this Book

David Brundage

Welcome to this book on the art of Daniel David Moses, poet, playwright, essayist, and the only Canadian in the current Norton Anthology of Drama. Despite his output and international presence, however, Moses is quite rightly included here in the Guernica Series recognizing essential but unduly overlooked Canadian writers. Director Colin Taylor, who has worked on numerous Moses productions since 1991, calls him, in the words of critic Nadine Spivak, the best-kept secret of Canadian drama of the last three decades (personal communication). In pre-show publicity for the 2010 Canadian tour of Almighty Voice and His Wife, playwright Yvette Nolan, who has also directed several Moses projects, referred to Almighty Voice as the best play you haven’t heard about (qt. by Prokosh).

Readers may quickly agree that Moses is, nevertheless, well recognized and highly respected within certain regional and disciplinary circles. As discussions in this Guernica collection indicate, he holds a seminal place in contemporary Aboriginal theatre and is well known and valued in literary and Indigenous studies and the fields with which they intersect. He is the ongoing subject of scholarly and international interest, and one senses that engagement will continue to grow. It is our hope that these selected explorations of his work will help encourage not only further critical attention but broader awareness that Moses is, like the classics of world literature with which Almighty Voice is now aligned, entertaining as well as consistently enlightening, thought-provoking and moving.

Centring the Circle

While Moses re-energizes non-Aboriginal forms and themes, Indigenous resources and spirit clearly play the dominant role in his creativity. He staunchly credits the oral tradition and Aboriginal (and specifically Delaware and Iroquois) world view as his artistic beacons. So it’s fortunate—as well as a privilege for me—that Tracey Lindberg and her colleagues in the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge and Research (CWKIR), Athabasca University, were keen to collaborate on this collection. Tracey recommended incorporating a strong oral approach through spoken discussions, and the result of that method should speak for itself. Her guidance, along with that of CWKIR, has led the book to its present voice. I’m grateful for their care with the subject as well as their patience with me along the way.¹

Scholars, Writers and Plurality

We agreed that, along with integrating a spoken approach, we would include a blend of creative writers and scholars as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants. Regional, national, and international representation also occurs in the mix. Within the natural limits, it has been our hope to provide reflections from a generous surround.

Since this approach results in a range of more personal and informal as well as analytical styles, we decided to alternate the spoken and written, to interweave the more personal versus more analytical styles.

About the Contents

Discussions focus on the first three-quarters or so of Daniel’s present body of work—poetry, plays, and a story—with reference at times to his essays and co-edited anthology of Native literature in Canada. Organization generally follows the order of when the work under discussion was written, with formal attention to the poetry coming before the plays. Discussion of the short story King of the Raft comes last because prose fiction is not one of Moses’ three main genres though one that is perhaps too easily overlooked.

Before the work-focused explorations, we provide background keyed to the personal dimensions of place, family, community, culture and biography. Included within these introductory elements is a more formal descriptive overview of the poetry and plays up to the present as well as an informal afternoon with Mr. David Moses, Mrs. Blanche Moses, and their son Daniel. Following the discussion with family, explorations of the writing begin. Just looking over the titles and topics that follow, we receive a reminder that here is a writer open to multiple rich readings from many viewpoints including perception, history, politics and justice, culture and place, ecology, identity, poetics, psychology and healing, philosophy and spirituality. Most if not all of these angles enter into the discussions.

The Explorations

The explorations, focused on specific works, themes, and aspects, begin with two essays on poetry. As Kristina Fagan Bidwell points out, Moses began his publishing journey as a poet. Furthermore, although his poetry has been under-recognized, it remains at the heart of his work. With this in mind, when approached about contributing to a dialogue on Moses, Fagan Bidwell and Randy Lundy were equally passionate in choosing poetry as subject.

Discussion begins with Fagan Bidwell’s essay on Moses’ first published poetry collection, Delicate Bodies (1980). Noting this work to be carefully crafted and lyrical, qualities we have come to associate with Moses’ later verse as well, she asks what may be distinctly Delaware and Iroquois about it. She reminds us that both the Delaware and the Iroquois have been farmers since before colonization. Agricultural tradition has laid down a sensitivity to cycles, and the poems recognize the transience of life, the susceptibility to injury, delicate holocaust and decomposition. Like Appleford in his later essay on Moses’ ghosts, Fagan Bidwell pauses to assure us that, if this makes Moses sound like a morbid writer, he isn’t. Rather, she sees the collection drawing us into awareness of our human-animal being, our interconnectedness with all aspects of life and death, discovering the need to live fully and how to be more than awake. The pattern that brings death and decay carries on to rebirth. In pursuing Moses’ attention to these themes, Fagan Bidwell makes interesting connections to Delaware practice such as ritual words of thanksgiving and songs sung to celebrate the cycles. Moses’ Aboriginality as poet, she finds, is not a matter of obvious external markers, not some monolithic expression of tradition (Moses, as with all Aboriginal writers, uses a mixture of various cultural influences and choices), but rather something individual and internal.

This theme takes us directly to the question Lundy poses with the title of his essay: So What’s Indian about Your Poetry, Anyway? Written before River Range Poems (2009) or A Small Essay on the Largeness of Light and Other Poems (2012), his discussion engages with Delicate Bodies (1980), The White Line (1990) and Sixteen Jesuses (2000). Drawing from his own experience as Indigenous (Cree) poet, Lundy concedes to the challenges and risks of attempting to define Native poetry but sees the necessity of these attempts. He then unfolds an understanding of various poems from Moses’ first three collections as connected to Indigenous worldview, extending and elaborating, as it happens, on core insights raised in the previous essay.

Like Fagan Bidwell, Lundy observes that Moses’ poems are not Indian in images or themes anticipated by the common mainstream expectations. In directing us toward essential considerations, he makes a central point that [h]uman beings have something to learn from attention carefully directed toward the non-human world. Critiquing the Euro-centric outlook, Lundy observes its idea of human as an existence apart from nature, a divisive and alienated conception that Moses’ poetry arguably recognizes as a problem but ultimately does not accept. With reference to various Moses lines, Lundy finds a suggestion that rather than emphasizing a break between language and the world, perhaps we need to see them in relationship. In this vein, he defines metaphor as language’s best effort to point toward the complex, relational, and interconnected nature of being. Unlike the case with a good deal of Western poetry, the emphasis is not on alienation, not on competing to replace the thing itself and thus invariably on failure, but rather on healing through translation of the thing itself, so that we understand our fundamental oneness with it.

Indeed, both poetry essays in this opening section point to ways of knowing that may elude the Western habit of mind, yet like the works they discuss, both motivate the reader to keep aspiring to natural relationships, to listen to our own intimations of interconnectedness. Both writers suggest in their respective manner that in these poems we may find personal and planetary medicine and thus maintain the relationships that hold creation together (Leroy Little Bear, qtd. by Fagan Bidwell).

Next in the selection of explorations come various responses to Moses’ first produced play Coyote City (1988) and the cycle of city plays that followed from it. Several questions concerning Coyote City arise in the 1999 interview with the playwright recorded in Lethbridge, Alberta, beginning with the question of how he felt about the play ten years after. The discussion touches as well on characterization, the evangelical Christian element, the pull of the city for certain people on a reserve, and the playwright’s own personal feelings living in Toronto. Apart from the interview, Moses also referred to the classically tragic nature of Coyote City, which has been combined with the Indigenous story of Coyote visiting the shadow land.

With Tracey Lindberg’s Spirited Border Crossings, attention to Coyote City extends to Big Buck City and City of Shadows while becoming more concentrated and deeper. She points to the complex and challenging nature of Moses’ writing that requires we participate. In this essay, touched with the spirit of creative non-fiction, Lindberg guides her reflections around definitions of key terms that come into view like docks and locks in a river: Indigenous, challenging and challenge, translate, ghost, and translator. Spirited Border Crossings suggests we consider Moses as a translator, and, with an interesting connection to Lundy’s essay, as a being between human and inhuman, challenging us to see the life in the living and in that which many perceive as non-living. Concern is raised for the peril of border crossing, and thought given to the burden of developing critical Indigenous (literary) theory after Indigenous ways of knowing and spirituality were brutalized. Readers should come away truly challenged, and pursued by memorable, germane images such as that of Moses the ferryman between good and evil, spirit and corporeal, past and present.

Further interesting discussion of Coyote City occurs in the subsequent piece, Lindberg’s 2003 interview with Ojibway playwright Drew Hayden Taylor.² One of the leading figures along with Cree playwright Tomson Highway and Daniel David Moses in the renaissance of Indigenous theatre in the late nineteen eighties, Taylor characterizes Moses as the quiet one ... wide-ranging ... a very powerful force in the world of contemporary Native theatre. He contemplates ways in which their process and type of writing differ but also notes that Moses, Highway, and Taylor all developed their voice through strong women. He and Lindberg consider and debate the play’s female characters, agreeing on the importance of Boo. They also deal with how to describe and understand the play’s setting and relationships to the theme of disconnectedness. Centring Taylor’s characterization of the play is the appeal of cross-cultural myth and identifiable human situations, giving this work on disconnection a power for wide-ranging connection.

In his reflection Enlightening Shadows, Don Perkins explores the lessons in living and in confronting the destructive forces that characterize Moses’ city plays, with special attention to the first of those, Coyote City. Heeding the advice of Marie Annhaarte Baker that it is difficult to define the Trickster, that we need to know what inspires a particular rendition, Perkins closely examines what the Trickster spirit meant to Moses at the time of writing Coyote City. He uncovers the co-existence of good and evil along with a poetics at the heart of Moses’ work (and quite possibly central for an understanding of much Indigenous writing): the idea of balancing three traditional functions or goals of storytelling—to entertain, to educate, and to heal. Despite concentrating his study on the tragic first play of the cycle, Perkins recognizes in Moses a belief in the power of change. As Moses says of the Trickster—who measures the distance between what one wants and what one can get, between what ought to be and what is—he makes the distance shrink.

Like Spirited Border Crossings, Rob Appleford’s Ghost Writer with a Vengeance employs inventive devices to explore the difficult nature of Moses’ writing. Placing the audience in a self-consciously awkward initial position, writing a parable about realist theatre (and reproductive economy theatre) as well as staging the return of the living dead may be reasons Moses’ plays take time to gather wider audiences. But they are also reasons to reward the engaged participant who pushes on, as Appleford does, to ask questions about how the plays deal with the indeterminacy of social space and social life, about how being alive and being dead are both ... a lot of damned work. Appleford’s focus in this exploration attends a good deal to identifying and contemplating voice, ontology, and the driving force of desire. In the course of his discussion he offers a number of interesting and stimulating thoughts about theatre and Moses’ specific approach to it. One of Moses’ distinctive methods, for instance, is the importance he places on stage directions.³ This challenging essay on a challenging cycle of plays concludes with an interpretation of final effect which challenges other views, such as that of Ric Knowles, and should prompt further response from us in what Moses calls the negotiation" of understandings.

The next three explorations in this book deal with the Moses work that Christopher Hoile in a March 2009 performance preview for the Stage Door declares one of few plays firmly considered as part of the canon of great Canadian drama despite that few people have actually had a chance to see it on stage. That play, of course, is Almighty Voice and His Wife.

In her essay on the madness of colonial agricultural policies underlying the play’s story, Jo-Ann Episkenew provides valuable background, including an informed reconstruction of what likely led the young Cree man of the title—Kisê-manitô-wêw—to kill a steer in 1895 on the One Arrow Reserve in Central Saskatchewan where he lived, a few short miles from Batoche, the site of the 1885 Resistance. That action led to his arrest, followed by a jailer’s bad attempt at humour. The jailer suggested to Kisê-manitô-wêw that he was to be hanged the next day, precipitating the young Cree man’s desperate escape. A tasteless joke, says Episkenew, set in motion one of the biggest manhunts in Canadian history."

The 1985 Resistance that Episkenew mentions was the second wave of what are also called the Riel Rebellions (of 1870 and 1885) when Canada sent the military against Métis and First Nations. While this use of armed force showed what Canada was prepared to do if Aboriginal people appeared to step too far outside the colonial comfort zone, in contrast to the USA, the government of Canada generally pursued other means than military in its bid to take over the land. It proposed the negotiating of partnerships, or what proved almost always to be ostensible partnerships: treaties that Aboriginal people understandably took to be sincere agreements between nations. The government, however, mainly ignored treaty commitments, or at least their spirit. For example, as mentioned in the 2010 program information of the Native Earth Performing Arts Almighty Voice tour, in 1914, the government allowed expropriation of any Indian land near a town or city of eight thousand or more inhabitants regardless of any previous treaty or written agreement.

Ignoring and reneging on agreements went hand in hand with imposing increasingly paternalistic policies. Also mentioned in the touring production program information are the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869, assuming the inherent superiority of British ways and the need for Indians to become English-speakers, Christians, and farmers. The unilateral Indian Act of 1876, still operating today after various amendments, set out definitions and regulations as Canada’s idea of enacting treaties. Most policies and their procedural enactments were aimed at forced assimilation. Especially dark instruments of this goal were the infamous residential schools, one of which Moses’ character White Girl attended. The 2010 touring company program for Almighty Voice notes that in 1907 Dr. Peter Bryce reported a thirty to sixty percent death rate in most western residential schools. Mark Abley writes that an epidemic of trachoma, which caused blindness, had swept the schools in the three western provinces by the Great Depression (87). Nevertheless, by 1930 almost seventy-five percent of all Native children were in these schools (program notes).

On June 2, 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its summary report and recommendations following up on six years of gathering testimony of more than 6,000 survivors of the schools, of which 130 operated across the country from the 1870s to 1996. The Commission’s report estimates that all told more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children attended the schools, essentially imprisoned, separated from parents, communities, and culture. The Commission estimates that, for various reasons related to inadequate funding and resources and general devaluing of Indigenous people, 32,000 children died there. As the Commission points out, this is greater than the number of Canadian soldiers who died in the Second World War. The report’s authors conclude that these schools—as merely one aspect of colonial strategy—served as an instrument of cultural genocide.

These facts are becoming better known today, but when Almighty Voice and His Wife debuted in 1991, few non-Aboriginals knew them.⁴ This inglorious part of Canada’s history was not acknowledged in schools and otherwise not mentioned. So for non-Aboriginal audiences and readers, for the past twenty-five years, Almighty Voice and other plays by Moses reflecting historical injustice and its current manifestations have contributed to a much-needed educating process. This repression and suppression of awareness in the mainstream may partly explain why in the round-table discussion comprising writers Maria Campbell, Gregory Scofield, Brenda Macdougall, and Tracey Lindberg, the question arises of whether Almighty Voice and His Wife will strike Aboriginal audiences and non-Aboriginal ones quite differently.

Moses has said that minstrel shows had still existed at the time Almighty Voice died (How My Ghosts Got Pale Faces 73). He came to think about them after getting the idea of having Aboriginal actors play white roles in whiteface. [O]n its other side was the image of white actors in blackface. Thus prompted, he did some research into the history and conventions of the minstrel show and discovered that the troupes performing these entertainments had travelled across much of North America in the 1800s, not far behind the settlers. He found that the minstrel show was a variety show of stereotyped blacks played by whites. The existence of minstrel shows at the time of Almighty Voice allowed Moses to imagine that people who gathered to watch the standoff that resulted in the deaths of Almighty Voice and his friends might have watched and enjoyed a minstrel show. Their attitudes might well have been formed or at least encouraged by its racist stereotypes.

While the round-table conversation rises and falls—as Tracey says, on flights of fancy, seeking other worlds to visit and a better one to build right here—its launch pad is Almighty Voice and His Wife. Much of interest is said on that subject. Maria Campbell explains the second act (the parody Minstrel Show) as being for her like going into West Edmonton Mall. The fragmented energy, she finds—and poet Gregory Scofield agrees—is foreign to the slower pace energy of prairie (and more rural) Indigenous communities. Will an alien energy in Act Two make the play seem inaccessible, even irrelevant, for some communities? As a historian, Brenda Macdougall enjoys the historical parts and personally enjoys the switch to vaudeville, but agrees that the fast style and anti-colonial content suggest a work that is not primarily directed to the community where it is set. Different viewpoints emerge on various questions, including the role and effect of derogatory, racist words in Act Two. Moses has suggested that the madness, pain and bitterness of Act Two works like a purging or an exorcism (78). Some of the round-table participants might add for those who have the framework to get it. But all seem in their way to agree with Elder Campbell’s reflection that maybe the discomfiting zaniness is saying: Here we are and I guess we can dance.

Just as mainstream society until recently knew little or nothing about the residential schools, it was equally oblivious to the extent of hunger, near-starvation, and starvation that occurred among Indigenous communities as a result of deliberate policy and what Jo-Ann Espiskenew in her essay on agricultural policies of the time calls slipshod management.⁵ Moses himself was innocent or, more accurately, ignorant of the history of that part of Canada even by the time of his MFA. He’d learned at school that Canadians, unlike the Americans, settled by nice humane treaties (70). But working as a researcher at the Six Nations Woodland Cultural Centre in Brantford in the fall of 1978, he came upon a version of Almighty Voice’s story and couldn’t make sense of how what seemed a minor contretemps ended in an assault with cannons. Interestingly, while Moses suggests in How My Ghosts Got Pale Faces that we don’t need to know why Almighty Voice killed a cow (Episkenew says steer, and the refinement might be revealing if one is pressed for food and must choose between a steer and a milk cow), Episkenew treats that question as important, at least from a historical perspective. Moses also suggests we don’t need to know who the animal belonged to (various versions and theories occur in print), perhaps simply because in an ethical world the animal would have been granted for those who needed it. The same reasoning would also answer why we don’t need to know why Almighty Voice killed the animal—the reason could not possibly match the consequences. But knowing the truly profound effect on the first generation of First Nations’ communities to be confined to reserves (and for whom the buffalo were no longer available), one has a hard time disagreeing that the state’s agricultural policies in effect inspired the play.

As well as providing a lucid and concise understanding of the policies and their relation to the colonial project in general, Episkenew’s essay looks closely at the characterization of both Almighty Voice and White Girl, arguing that their depiction adds a human dimension to history, helping drive home the enormity of what was happening. The author contributes yet another valuation of the second act, with reference to how Ghost (Almighty Voice) acquires an imposing command of the English language in short order. He uses it not to submit to colonizers but to prompt White Girl to free herself from her state of possession by the white god. She herself is seen in Act One as a believable and, says Episkenew, formidable character. Moses’ depiction of how ordinary flawed characters can achieve extraordinary effects, she argues, reminds us of the resilience of Aboriginal people.

The next discussion, Helen Gilbert’s Black and White and Re(a)d All Over Again, also takes up Almighty Voice’s concern with injustice, consequential damage, and attempted corrective action, in this case through exploring Moses’ use of the parody minstrel show and particularly his inspired whiteface device. Describing the play as widely discussed, bitter but lyrical, and a theatrical tour-de-force, she examines how it applies metatheatrics whiteface

to historicize a narrative about colonization and displacement while presenting the audience with familiar yet refracted images of Otherness that speak not only to local circumstances but also to a mode of representation linking diverse colonial projects across space and time.

To help demonstrate the significant connection across space and time, Gilbert compares and contrasts the Moses script and its first two Canadian productions (Great Theatre Company 1991, Native Earth Performing Arts 1992) to Australian Murri writer-director Wesley Enoch’s all-Aboriginal adaptation of the 1942 play Fountains Beyond by George Landen Dann, which played the QUT Gardens Theatre in Brisbane in 2000.⁶

Gilbert notes that Moses uses stereotypes inflected by frontier American life and decades of Hollywood clichés to enrich the parody possibilities. She looks closely at how various aspects of the minstrel show function in Moses’ script to critique crude racism and the traps of Western liberal humanism. The author also offers a most interesting detailed study of different directorial choices between the Great Theatre Company production of Act Two and the Native Earth Performing Arts handling of the same act. Moses’ use of the whiteface concept, says Gilbert, achieves highly complex characters and ultimately attempts to envisage an aesthetic (and political) bridge between so-called white and non-white cultures.

As the last work-focused exploration in this collection, my own essay ‘King of the Raft’ and the Roots of Canadian Fusion also deals with the question of a possible bridge between cultures. The argument here is that Moses’ much anthologized early short story King of the Raft illustrates a direction he was taking toward an intermingling of Aboriginal and Western elements into a distinctively new style, an achievement on the individual, Canadian, and international levels. Elaborating this idea with reference as needed to cultural, aesthetic, political, and spiritual aspects, I draw on John Ralston Saul’s argument that Canada (at its best) is a métis nation (as distinct from Métis, the recognized distinct peoples in their respective communities). The idea of a métis nation or civilization is meant not in a racial sense (a dated European concept, as Saul points out) but in that of a new identity formed by four centuries of cultural mixing and negotiating. It fits with Moses’ description of his writing as métised (The ‘Or’ Question 139), an inter-mixture of two identities (of which there may be near-infinite variations), one of which—suited to grounding us to the here—is First Nation.

Following my essay, Tracey Lindberg’s recent interview with Daniel David Moses should form an interesting then-and-now comparison with the 1999 interview that began discussions of Coyote City. The latest interview brings readers up to date with Moses’ current activities and concerns, seeks his thoughts on the challenges of balancing artistic work and academe, and adds to our understanding of his approach to his writing and his values as a writer and man. Following this discussion, a radio play by Moses, My Grandfather’s Face, returns us thematically to land, family, and community and the spiritual values which introduced the book.

Overall, these contents should add to a growing knowledge and enjoyment of Daniel David Moses as well as confirm Kristina Fagan Bidwell’s point that there is certainly far more to be done.

Notes

As a fringe benefit, I had some unforgettable opportunities to strum back-up guitar for Tracey. There’s nothing like the blues to help one through, and Tracey’s personal blues voice is as strong and remarkable as her style in the novel (see Birdie).

A lasting impression of the interview for many readers may be the sense it provides of how much has happened in the development of Canadian Indigenous theatre since Coyote City. Taylor refers to its vibrant rise across the regions. Now, over a decade since his comments in the interview, multiple examples may be offered from across the country, east to west and north. To mention just one, in August 2014, in Edmonton, Alberta Aboriginal Arts co-hosted The Blackness of White, a work by over two dozen community youth weaving together theatrical stories with music and movement guided and directed by Enoch Cree First Nations member Joshua Jackson and numerous assistants. The remarkably complex and technically detailed show, the result of a summer program in theatre arts at Enoch First Nation, took place at the Shoctor Stage in the Citadel Theatre, Edmonton’s flagship building for theatre arts.

In welcoming the audience, Alberta Aboriginal Arts Director Christine Frederick asked for a showing of hands to indicate how many people—most of them from nearby Enoch First Nation—were attending the Citadel for the first time. A wave of palpable triumph could be felt as most hands in the packed house went up. Four years before this event, Alberta Aboriginal Arts had presented Native Earth Performing Arts’ touring remount of Almighty Voice and His Wife. To make the connection between the years of theatrical vitality more explicit, in 2015 Moses received the Ontario Arts Council Aboriginal Award for significant contributions to the arts in Ontario and nominated emerging Six Nations actor, playwright, and dramaturge Falen Johnson for a supplementary prize marked for the next generation.

Falling between the overdue arrival in Edmonton of the Canadian classic by Moses and the notably talented performance of new material by the next generation from Enoch, the grassroots activist movement Idle No More swept the country and beyond. For a summary of Idle No More events and participants, see CBCnews. Timeline: Idle No More’s Rise. <http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/timeline-idle-no-more/>. The energy continues to grow and take new shape. It will certainly inform the future of Aboriginal writing and theatre.

A practice that Western-trained dramaturges often object to, especially when the stage directions describe too much of what the audience is to see or how the character behaves. This is conventionally (and politically) thought to be the provenance of directors, designers, and cast. Moses does not underuse or undervalue these other contributors, but it is important for the sometimes dream-like elements he uses to make them come across vividly in the scripts. For him, the playwright is involved in visioning and presenting all the elements of theatre, including its spectacle.

In his 2013 creative non-fiction biography Conversations with a Dead Man: The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott (poet and bureaucrat), Mark Abley suggests that it was only in the 1980s that anyone in a position of official power would admit the profound failure of the residential system or speak publicly about its victims (67). Even in the1980s, however, little was said or admitted on the subject. It wasn’t until 11 June 2008 that the Government of Canada offered the survivors of these schools an official apology. In a live broadcast from the House of Commons, Prime Minister Stephen Harper recognized that the schools were wrong, had caused great harm and had no place in our country. Critics, however, saw insufficient subsequent actions to sustain a sincere apology. Canada, for instance, did not formally endorse the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples until November 2010, and then only half-heartedly. On a visit to Pittsburgh in 2009, just one year after his official apology, Prime Minister Harper publicly stated, We [Canadians] have no history of colonialism. So we have all the things that many people admire about the great powers, but none of the things that threaten or bother them (Abley 135). Mark Abley reports an Ipsos Reid survey of June 2012 (six months prior to the Idle No More Movement) which found two thirds of respondents believing that Canada’s Aboriginal people are treated well by the Canadian government and receive too much money (35). For a recent study of Canada’s relative non-action on the UN Declaration’s commitment to respect, partnership, and reconciliation, see Mitchell, Terry and Claris Enns. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Monitoring and Realizing Indigenous Rights in Canada. CIGI. Policy Brief 39 (April 2014). Web. 10 Aug. 2015.

Historian James Daschuk’s 2013 book Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life became a best seller, spreading general awareness at last among non-Aboriginal readers of the conditions that Indigenous peoples of the prairies were forced to endure.

Gilbert explains that Dann’s 1942 play was controversial at the time because it focused on Aboriginal issues and critiqued white racism. Despite the playwright’s being white, Gilbert argues several reasons for categorizing Enoch’s adaptation as Aboriginal theatre, realizing this is a point that some critics may choose to debate.

Works Cited

Abley, Mark. Conversations with a Dead Man: The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. Madeira Park, BC: Douglas and McIntyre, 2013. Print.

CBCnews. Timeline: Idle No More’s Rise. < http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/ timeline-idle-no-more/>

Daschuk, James. Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Regina, SK: University of Regina Press, 2013. Print.

Hoile, Christopher. Rev. of Almighty Voice and His Wife. Dir. Michael Greyeyes. Native Earth Performing Arts. Theatre Passe Muraille. Toronto, 28 Mar.–12 April 2009. Stage Door. 31 Mar. 2009. Web. 10 Apr. 2015.

Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Reports. CBCnews. 2 June 2015. Web. 10 June 2015. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/read-the-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-reports-1.3097491

Mitchell, Terry and Claris Enns. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Monitoring and Realizing Indigenous Rights in Canada. CIGI. Policy Brief 39 (April 2014). Web. 10 Aug. 2015.

Moses, Daniel David. How My Ghosts Got Pale Faces. Pursued by a Bear. Toronto: Exile. 52-81. Print.

_____. The ‘Or’ Question.