A thousand years ago, when I was a young acolyte sitting at the feet of Tomson Highway – then artistic director of Canada’s premiere Indigenous theatre company, Native Earth Performing Arts – the groundbreaking playwright asked me: “Drew, you write mostly kitchen sink stuff, don’t you?” At that time, I had a handful of plays under my belt as I was still struggling to figure out the medium of stagecraft. Another author, Waubgeshig Rice, wrote the highly popular The Moon of the Crusted Snow, which takes place in an alternate version of now, after the electrical grid goes down, leaving the inhabitants of a fly-in reserve desperate to find a way to survive.Īh, how things change. Dimaline’s novel, The Marrow Thieves, is a dystopian novel where the dominant culture has lost the ability to dream, and now seek Indigenous bone marrow to alleviate the problem. Much like Robinson, authors such as Cherie Dimaline are exploring what could have been, not necessarily what was or is. And that comes with a lot of personal and supernatural problems. It embraces the fantastic.Ĭo-written and directed by Michelle Latimer, the show ( Trickster, on CBC) explores the difficult life of a teenager who discovers his father is Wee’git, the Heiltsuk trickster. It goes down avenues that a few decades ago would have seemed unlikely. Secondly, the fact that it mixed the real with the surreal was a great watershed moment. First, it demonstrated how far contemporary Indigenous storytelling has come from its days hanging around the campfire and kitchen table. The recent TV adaptation of Eden Robinson’s clever novel Son of a Trickster was amazing for two reasons.

Son of a trickster cbc