Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout

By Tomson Highway

Based on a deposition signed by 14 Chiefs of the Thompson River basin on the occasion of a visit to their lands by Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910, Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout is a ritualized retelling of how the Native Peoples of British Columbia lost their fishing, hunting and grazing rights, their lands, and finally their language without their agreement or consent, and without any treaties ever having been signed. It is one of the most compellingly tragic cases of cultural genocide to emerge from the history of colonialism, enacted by four women whose stories follow each other like the cyclical seasons they represent.

Written in the spirit of Shuswap, a “Trickster language” within which the hysterically comic spills over into the unutterably tragic and back, this play is haunted by the blood of the dead spreading over the landscape like a red mist of mourning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Feb 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781772015690

Tomson Highway

TOMSON HIGHWAY is a Cree author, playwright, and musician. His memoir, Permanent Astonishment, won the 2021 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. He also wrote the plays The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and the bestselling novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. He is a member of the Barren Lands First Nation and lives in Gatineau, Quebec.

Book preview

Cast of Characters

ERNESTINE SHUSWAP, fifty-three years old, strong-faced and handsome, one of those women who has weathered much in life but has weathered it with grace, with wise intelligence, and with humour.

ISABEL THOMPSON, forty-three years old, one of those people with a huge axe to grind and that axe, in her case, is religion. That is to say, she is the world’s most generous, most saintly, most perfect woman … in her mind.

ANNABELLE OKANAGAN, thirty-two years old, moody to a fault, either: (a) she is one of those people born with a dark cloud hanging over her; (b) something unresolved is chafing at her conscience; and/or

(c) that something is costing her sleep which, of course, is what makes her so darn grouchy.

DELILAH ROSE JOHNSON, twenty-one years old, beautiful, and three months pregnant. A high-strung girl to begin with, something about her bird-like physicality suggests a split personality, or something just as unsettling.

Setting

TIME: Thursday, August 25, 1910

SET: There is none. Rather, at centre-stage middle and six feet in the air hangs a cowboy hat, seemingly suspended from the middle of the sky, as if a ghost were wearing it. Four Styrofoam cubes – to be used as chairs, rocks, other objects as the need arises – sit scattered at random. An ancient gramophone (circa 1900) sits open on the floor by one of these chairs. A plain white backdrop hangs slashed by a line, curved, horizontal: the land in silhouette. The rest is lights, sound, music.

Note on Language

The language spoken by the women in this play, it must be stressed, is not English. Simply put, the Native people of the Thompson River Valley at the time here depicted (the early twentieth century) did not know the English tongue. Rather, they spoke Shuswap, Okanagan, Thompson (or Couteau, as the Thompson Nation is otherwise known), and other Native languages. In this play, they speak Shuswap, a tongue that works according to principles, and impulses, entirely different from those that underlie, that motor, the English language. For instance, because the principle underlying the Shuswap language is, in essence, a laughing deity (the Trickster), it is hysterical, comic to the point where its spillover into horrifying tragedy is a thing quite normal, utterly organic. That is to say, as in most languages of Native North America (that I know of anyway), the laughing god becomes a crying god becomes a laughing god, all in one swift impulse.

PROLOGUE

First, from the darkness, the gurgle of a river – rich, evocative, the voice of a land. It rises, fades. Out of this river-sound bleeds a very low note, on a cello, bowed. And sustained, all the way through the opening trio of monologues, with sporadic, jarring little grace notes, changes of key, that sort of thing, the whole point being that, though the monologues are comic more than anything, what has to be established, right off the top, is: (a) an atmosphere of ominous foreboding; and (b) the counterpoint of comedy and tragedy.

Next, three women will appear, each in turn, under icy pools of light, as from a silvery moon: one woman stage left; the second stage right; the third centre-stage. The pools of light should be limited to their faces, however, so that these faces look like masks in a Greek tragedy. In fact, that is what their voices should sound like as well, like those in a play by Euripides; that is, a mesmerizing weave of chant and prayer. The point here being that, though at first glance this may appear to be a very funny play, right from the start, there are undercurrents of darkness, of horrifying tragedy.

Last, this being 1910, the women are wearing long-sleeved, high-collared white cotton blouses, floor-length black skirts, and moccasins. The cello sustains its long, low note under.

MONOLOGUE ONE: Fade-in on ERNESTINE SHUSWAP as she stands looking out her window at the moon, or so it seems for, in fact, what she is looking at is her conscience. These are the words – and thoughts – that will resonate inside her mind, her heart, her body through the course of this day which we are about to witness. Long silence, then …

ERNESTINE

Ernestine Shuswap, I’m gonna get you, he says to me, first thing this morning. Get me? I says back to him, from my side of the bed. Get me for what? And the sun’s not even up yet, okay? It’s still pitch dark and he’s already got me going. A fish, Joe Shuswap says to me from right there on his pillow next to mine, like he’s talking to the ceiling. A fish. I’m getting you a fish. Oh, I says to him, relieved, kind of, cuz you see, I guess I heard him wrong. Hey! It was only five A.M., okay? I’m not even awake yet, okay? Not really. Oh, I says to him – my husband – from right there on my pillow next to his, What kind of fish, Joe Shuswap, what kind of fish you gonna get me? I says to him, as if I didn’t know what kind of fish, what am I, born yesterday? Anyway. He’s sitting up in bed now, yawning, stretching, trying real hard to come back from the dead. A trout, he says to me, his wife of thirty-seven years. A rainbow trout, biggest, hugest rainbow trout ever seen in this part of the world, that’s what I’m getting you, is what he says to me, Ernestine Shuswap of Kamloops, B.C. Down by the river, he says, yawning real wide. And now he’s walking to the kitchen, looking like a ghost cuz his long johns are all white. Me? Lying there still looking like a corpse, feeling like one, too. I’m going to the river and I’m sitting right there until the biggest, hugest, most gigantic rainbow trout in the history of the world lands right here in my hands, my husband, Joe, that’s what he says to me, first thing in the morning. And now he’s in the kitchen, lighting up the wood stove, priming up the pump, pouring water in the kettle, getting coffee ready, and he says … (big voice) Ernestine Shuswap, I’m getting you a trout. (Freeze. Pool of light stays on her face as …) MONOLOGUE TWO: Fade-in on ISABEL THOMPSON as she stands looking out her window at the moon, or so it seems for, in fact, what she is looking at is her conscience. These are the