An Afternoon with Drew Hayden Taylor, Playwright

Drew Hayden Taylor is a writer in many genres and is well known for his plays about Native people. His published plays include: Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock/Education is our Right, The Bootlegger Blues, and its sequels, The Baby Blues, and The Buz’Gem Blues, which recently ran in Los Angeles. Other published plays include Someday and its sequel, Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth. His other plays include The Girl Who Loved Horses and The Boy in the Treehouse. He has written, directed, or worked on approximately 17 film and video documentaries about Native issues. During an experimental journalism phase in his life, Drew spent a year and a half with CBC Radio as a Native Affairs reporter and later dabbled with Macleans, This Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Now Magazine, Southam News, and various other periodicals.

Drew reports that he went through a 'television phase' where he worked in various capacities on the Spirit Bay television series, a consultant on Danger Bay and Liberty Street, and later as a publicist for the made-for-TV movie Where the Spirit Lives. During this period he also wrote scripts for The Beachcomers, Street Legal and North of Sixty. More recently he has written for Prairie Berry Pie and The Longhouse Tales. As one of Canada's first Native scriptwriters, he has story edited numerous writing workshops for visible minority writers. His leading passion for many years has been the Theatre world, thanks to a stint as Playwright-In-Residence for Native Earth Performing Arts in the late 1980's. From 1994 to 1997, Drew proudly served as Native Earth's Artistic Director.

In the last thirteen years, the world has seen fit to witness over sixty professional productions of his plays, including his most recent, an adaptation of the Brecht/Weill musical Mahagonny, titled Sucker Falls: A Musical About Demons of the Forest and the Soul. He has also been dabbling in the world of prose, writing short stories for various anthologies, not to mention satirical column in the Peterborough Examiner, Windspeaker, The Prairie Dog, etc. A collection of his best was published in a book titled Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations of a Blue-eyed Ojibway and the sequels, Funny, You Don’t Look Like One Too/Two and this year, Funny…Three. An anthology he co-edited titled Voices: Being Native in Canada was published by the University of Saskatchewan Press. Drew's collection of short stories published by Talon Books is called Fearless Warriors.

In 2000, Drew directed a documentary titled, Redskins, Tricksters and Puppy Stew, produced by the National Film Board of Canada. The Strange Case of Bunny Weequod, a television mystery/drama written by Drew, was filmed entirely in Ojibway, and aired on the CBC several times in 1999. Drew also directed Circle of All Nations, a documentary about Algonquin elder William Commanda and his spiritual conference. He is currently researching a new NFB documentary on Native Erotica, as well, he is working on two movie scripts, and several new plays. Recent publications include 400 Kilometres, published 2005 and Me Funny, a compilation of stories by First Nations people of Canada, edited and compiled by Drew (to be published January 2006).

Adapted and reprinted by permission (Athabasca University - Centre for Language and Literature: Canadian Writers)

The following presentation has been transcribed and included in this journal with the permission of Drew Hayden Taylor and the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge and Research (CWIKR) at Athabasca University.

Introduction by Dave Brundage, on behalf of CWIKR

Thank you very much. I don't know to whom I owe the honor of getting to introduce Drew Hayden Taylor, but I greatly appreciate it, and I'm going to make the absolute most of it for two minutes. I'd like to mention three qualities in his writing that definitely appeal to me and the students that I work with. The first one is an uncompromising honesty in calling a spade a spade, whether it's convenient to say so at the time or not. An example I can think of is his passing reference in commentary about WP Kinsella, just to mention that he really can write (See 'Waiting for Kinsella' in Funny, You Don’t Look Like One). It may seem small, but that's what writing is partly about. Or criticizing a TV show for stereotyping when that TV network or TV show could be a potential employer.

A second quality that we all admire is versatility. I'm sure you know about … the healing power of humor, so we'll mention that we know about that wonderful strength in his writing. But if you read a story like The Girl Who Loved Horses, this drama demonstrates a capacity to touch a deep level that humor does as well. We often forget that versatility, as well as the versatility to be able to write in different genres. If they shut the theatre, he could write sonnets for a while. It's like instruments for a musician to have several to play. It enriches your grasp and vision.

The third quality…is the ability to take a feeling and idea and make it concrete, give it a bit of reality. The one example I came upon is his definition of an academic as "someone who watches pornographic movies but never has sex." Finally, although we just got to meet now, my suspicion is he must be a really nice guy, because …we keep inviting him back to talk. I'm really looking forward to what he has to say. I'd like to welcome Drew Hayden Taylor…

Drew Hayden Taylor: First of all, thank you all for inviting me here. I like to come back to wonderful Edmonton. I'll start off by telling you more about myself and how I ended up here in Edmonton. I'm what I call a professional writer. I do not have a day job. I do not spend my afternoons saying, "Would you like fries with that?" I've been lucky enough to have been fairly versatile in what I do. I'm primarily a playwright. I've been artistic director of Canada's premier Native theatre company. I was director for three years of the Native Earth Performing Arts. I've had over 60 productions of my work done in three countries, over a dozen plays. I like to think of myself as a playwright. I'm married to theatre, but I have mistresses. Other than writing for plays, I've also written for television. My very first credit will date me. My very first writing credit that I consciously remember was an episode of the Beachcombers. I said that at the University of Alberta yesterday afternoon and saw a bunch of the kids going, "What?" Yes, that's way back when it (TV) was black and white, young kiddies. Since then I've written for Street Legal, North of 60, a couple of kid shows, as well as a couple of half hour anthology dramas, and a whole bunch of things. I've written for television quite a bit. I have also been a columnist and journalist. Currently I have a column in three newspapers, as well as writing articles for a bunch of other newspapers. Mostly humor based. For a bunch of strange reasons, I don't quite understand this, I have been categorized as a humorist. Anybody in my family will tell you, I'm not the least bit funny.

Two years ago I released a documentary that I directed for the National Film Board of Canada. It's a documentary on Native humor, and its healing effects. It's called Redskins, Tricksters, and Puppy Stew. It was a great success. I'm told it was the best-selling video at the Ontario NFB Office all last year. I screened that in New York and Washington, all across Canada, all over the place. There seems to be a definite interest in the world of Native humor. If you watch the dominant media and pop culture, we are often only portrayed as being about land claims, blockades, or substance abuse. That seems to be the existence of Native people in pop culture. I have been to over 120 Native communities across Canada and the States. Everywhere I went, I was greeted with a smile, a laugh, and a good joke. I wanted to represent that to the culture, that we weren't all oppressed depressors. At least I wasn't. I'm fairly sure my mother, who is a 72 year old Ojibwa woman, I'd look at my mother and say, my mother's not oppressed. My mother is a single mother, she’s very strong. I refused to believe what the media was saying about my mother, my family, and myself. I decided to go out and write new works, and explore. So I did this documentary about exploring the human nature of humor. There's a Blood elder I met who once said, 'humor is the WD40 of healing.' I thought, yep, that works for me. Based on its success – it's been screened twice on Bravo – the executive producer for NFB told me she liked very much what we've done. She said, "Drew, this is a very good documentary, do you have any other topics you think would make a great documentary?" I paused and said -- as God is my witness this was a joke – "Yes, Native erotica." She paused and went, "what a great idea. Leave the proposal on my desk."

All of a sudden it's like, oh God, … So I spent the last two years researching and putting the proposal together. It's been a fun two years. You should see the receipts I've had to turn in (laugh). Two working titles. One is Scent of an Indian, or the other one is The Night was Dark and so was He. That's currently on the desk at NFB, and I should find out in a month whether they're going to put your money into it.

I do a bunch of different things. I write short stories. I just basically get an idea and try to figure out the best way to develop that idea. I've had a fairly good career. I grew up on a small Ojibwa reserve in Central Ontario, a place called Curve Lake. For those who know Ontario, draw a line between Toronto and Ottawa, and it's about a third of the way to Ottawa from Toronto. Home Sweet Home. I grew up there for my first 18 years with my mother. My standard joke is I'm half Ojibwa, half Caucasian, so that makes me an "occasion." Of course I like to think, a special occasion. I grew up on the reserve of my mother and my mother's family. My father took off before I was born, so I've had no connection with him whatsoever. But I was in the unique position of growing up in an Ojibwa reserve looking the way I do. It set the stage for some interesting identity issues, shall we say, which I have spent the last 15 years milking. It's done me well. At the age of 18, I came to a horrible conclusion about life. As I said, Curve Lake, when I was growing up there, had about 800 people. My mother was the oldest of 14, and it became very obvious to me in my teenage years, that I was related to every girl on the reserve. So that's as good an incentive to leave the reserve and go off to college. I've always been telling Native educational institutions, milk that angle. I went off to Toronto for radio and television broadcasting, and the rest is history.

I've never been to university. Yet I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time in universities, and having my books studied in universities. I've decided that is the definition of irony. What else to tell you? My start in writing came quite late. When I was 16, two things happened that made me decide not to be a writer. First of all, there was a band election on my reserve, and I had a friend contact me to write a letter for a local Native newspaper on the election. So I wrote it out. I was very proud of it. I showed it to my mother and my mother said, "why do you want to be a writer? It's not going to get you anywhere." So that took the wind out of my sails. About five months later when I was in grade 11, I went to my English teacher and I remember distinctly finding him in his office rooting through a file cabinet. I asked him, "is it possible to make a living from creative writing?" Without even looking up he said, "No, not really." So that ended my interest in being a writer for a number of years. I always thought I would end up working at the band office, embezzling money to the DIA. But it was not to be. I ended up going off to college. But I do firmly believe that there is a plan in this universe, that there are things that are meant to happen, that fate will do things to you. I find myself in a position of being a somewhat successful Native playwright. Having never taken a theatre course in my life, growing up on the reserve, I always thought theatre was dead white people. What connection does that have to my life? None whatsoever. I didn't like theatre. When I got started in theatre, the number of plays I'd seen I could count on my fingers. That's because I had friends who were in them or worked on them, and I was just there to support them. But evidently, it was meant to be. If the truth be told, I hate writing. I hate writing with a passion. If I could do anything else, I would. There's nothing more terrifying than looking at a blank computer screen and thinking you have to create life and universe and a family, that other people are going to sit and pay good money to see and criticize. It is quite terrifying. But after years of experience, I subscribe to what I refer to as the Dorothy Parker School of Writing. She once said, "I hate writing, but I love having written."

I'm using a bad metaphor that was supplied to me by another writer, a woman writer. It is like giving birth. The pain of getting it out, getting it there, writing it, correcting it, doing a workshop of actors to read your play and a dramaturge to read your play. A workshop is basically people you hire to tell you how bad your script is. So it's very agonizing. You go through all this pain, then finally you see it up on stage, you see it on a book or on television. You start to get that glow and you go, oh that's what I did. It wasn't so hard. What else can I start working on?

My introduction to the world of theatre was very ignominious. I woke up one morning and I was a playwright. That's my introduction to theatre. I had no burning issues that I wanted to tell the universe. I did not want to change society. I had no story that I had to share with audiences. I was one of the few people you meet that got into theatre for the money. What happened was, you pretty well know who Tomson Highway is? At that time, he was the artistic director of Native Earth Performing Arts. He had just been given a grant for a playwright program for Native Earth and he was pretty desperate because at that time in Ontario there were only two working Native playwrights. There was Tomson Highway, who was the artistic director, and there was Daniel David Moses, who was the outgoing playwright in residence. They got a nice chunk of money. As with any organization that gets grant money, he was reluctant to return it. But there was nobody else there and at that time, 1988, so early in the Native theatre renaissance, there was nobody around, specifically in Toronto, who could be recommended. Low and behold, Tomson was very desperate, and he went to the bottom of the barrel where he found me passed out. My writing credit up until that point had been a half hour episode of the Beachcombers that I had written two years earlier when I was 24.

That too was a series of circumstances. I was doing an article on adapting Native stories into television film format. I ended up talking with the story producers for the Beachcombers. A third of their cast was Native. The producer and I got talking and I don't remember if it was me or her, but I submitted two stories, and she bought one. I wrote it, the season ended, it just sort of happened. Life went on.

But in 1998 Tomson phoned me up and said, "Would you like to be our playwright in residence? You get a nice salary for 20 weeks, and all you have to do is come to two rehearsals, and maybe at the end of that, write a play." At that time I was into two contracts. I had no work. I felt like, okay, why not? That's how I became a playwright. So I sat through rehearsals for these two plays. … This is how disdainful I was of the world of theatre. I showed up the first day of rehearsal … with three newspapers. I went into the back row of the theatre and just read the papers all day. That was my introduction to theatre. I was just so disinterested. But as the case may be, to use another cliché, I was bitten by the bug somewhat afterwards. Part of my responsibility was writing a play for the very first native writer's festival that was held at Native Earth. So I did this play. I didn't know who to get. I got the guy who directed all of Tomson's early work, a dramaturge. His name is Larry Lewis. He's a very unknown person. He handles Canadian theatre and Native theatre. He created Tomson Highway. He dramaturged and directed all his work. He dramaturged and directed my first six plays. And he ran a Native theatre company, even though he was non-Native. In my personal opinion, he's as much responsible for the explosion of Native theatre as Tomson. But he's not very well known. So I met him, and I asked him to dramaturge my play, which was called, Up the Road. It was a three act, 2-1/2 hour opus, by somebody who had no idea what he was doing. We work shopped it, and after the workshop and public reading, I took it into the back yard, took a bullet through the title page, and buried it. It'll never see the light of day again. I was content. I fulfilled my contract, life is over in theatre. I'll find something else interesting to do. Let's go out and try and find a career.

But things were not meant to be that way. Larry Lewis had just taken over artistic directorship of a Native theatre company called De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig Theatre Group. De-Ba-Jeh-Mu-Jig is an Ojibwa word meaning storyteller or tattler of tales. He had taken it over just after we finished my workshop. He had produced Rez Sisters, and basically had exhausted the potential canon of Native plays for his theatre company. So he was concerned. He phoned me up and said, "Drew, will you be writing a new play?" I said, "No, I'm not a playwright." He said, "I'll pay you." I said, "Okay."

Toronto at Dreamer's Rock book cover So I sat down like, oh God, I gotta write another play. My first one was such a disaster. I thought, how can I make this interesting? I've always been partial to Sci-Fi, fantasy, and stuff like that. I decided to copy these three characters. One from 400 years ago before contact, one from now, and one from 100 years in the future after self-government had been attained. I thought, "I'll make them all 16 year old boys. But why are they there?" Then I went to another topic of interest to me, the concept of identity. What makes a Native person a Native person? Or how do they perceive each other to be Native? So again, those three characters with three different perceptions of what being Native means. I thought, "What the heck, I'll just do that." I did it as a one-act play for the money, as mercenary as that sounds. It later went on to be the most successful play I've ever written. It's always amazing, because when you write something and you don't know the rules, it can completely screw up, as my first play did. Or because you don't now the rules and you don't know the structure, you end up making something very new, unusual and innovative. That's what happened with Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock. It was originally supposed to go on for 30 performances from this rinky dink theatre company on Manitoulan Island. Within the first two weeks of being on tour, they started getting more and more bookings. It ended up to be 90 bookings in three months, doing three shows a day. It was a touring show. This is how twisted things were. Most writers have to hit up a publisher to get their book published. The publisher of Fifth House phoned me up. They said, "I heard about your play, I heard it's very exciting." They'd just published Tomson's two plays, Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing and we'd be interested in publishing it. I told this to all of my writer friends and they just banged their head against the wall. I went, "Yeah okay." So it was published. The following year, again in Toronto, and I'd won what's called the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award, in 1992. It's a very prestigious award for writing. I won it, my first play. It included a plaque and a cheque for $10,000, which I almost lost in a bar that night. But the funny thing being, the next day I couldn't find the cheque. Hung over, I had this horrible vision of phoning up the Ontario Arts Council and saying, "Hi, this is Drew Hayden Taylor, I'm the Native playwright that won the award last night. I think I lost the cheque in a bar. Can you put a hold payment on that and issue me another one?" This does nothing about stereotype busting, does it?

Anyway, the interesting thing about TDR, on retrospect 15 years later, is everything about the play should not be successful. It's a one-act play about 16-year-old boys who find themselves on this rock, which is a real place, Dreamer’s Rock, on Manitoulan Island. … Technically, it shouldn't work for a number of reasons. One, the play is all one act, one scene. Lights up, 50 minutes later lights down. There's no break in the action. They're there. They go through the whole thing. They walk away 50 minutes later. There's no break, it's all going. Secondly, it is physically restrictive. It's supposed to be at the top of this pinnacle of rock that's actually the size of these two tables put together, cut by half. So you have three characters that are limited in their movements. There's very little physicality involved. I commented earlier that there's a production of it in Vancouver that was huge. The stage was three times bigger than Dreamer’s Rock, and it had them running back and forth. It had this physicality to it that wasn't there in the original production, and wouldn't have been there on your real Dreamer’s Rock. So, it was very static. Thirdly, it was very talky. It was issue oriented. It dealt with issues about identity and stuff like that. But I was wrong, it went over amazingly.

Since then, I've had plays produced here, in the States, in Italy. Thus was born a very interesting theatrical career that was completely unexpected. Talk to my mom. I had one of my plays produced in Montreal. I remember getting the press package with all the reviews. I'm sitting at home with my mother. We're reading the press reviews, and they're all great press reviews. My mother looks at me with this perplexed look and says, "Where did this come from?"…. "I don't know." But, I grew up surrounded by storytellers. We used to sit around and tell these marvelous stories all the time. Some real, some just funny things that had happened. I grew up in a world of humor and storytelling. Theatre is the next logical progression in storytelling. It's just going from telling stories around a campfire to telling stories around a stage. Like storytelling, theatre has the ability to take the audience on a journey, using your voice, your body, and your imagination. So I think that's one of the reasons Native theatre suddenly burst onto the scene in the mid and late '80s. If you're writing prose, if you're writing short stories, novels or whatever, you've got to have a strong understanding of the English language. If you're doing television or film, there's a whole different structure involved. You have to know a whole new technology and language. So it became obvious to me that theatre became the number one form of expression in those early years. It's something most Native people are familiar with – telling a story. Like a joke or any story, theatre has a beginning, a middle, an end. And you set up confrontation resolution. That’s why I think Native people automatically twigged into it. Rez Sisters started in November '86. The Native theatre began to gain momentum in '89, after Dry Lips was produced, and they started Festival. In the next five years, all these Native plays started coming out. It was like people finding their voice again. The funny thing is… that voice was very dark, very accusatory.

The first five or six years of Native theatre was angry, which makes a lot of sense. When an oppressed people get their voice back, they will write about the oppression. Tomson Highway likes using the saying, "before the healing can take place, the poison must be exposed." So in my opinion, having been there, that's what was happening during those early years. That poison was being exposed. The oppression was coming out in all these writings. It was all very dark, very angry, very accusatory. While that is logical and necessary and completely understandable, I remember bumping into a Native woman who was coming out of seeing a Native play. She said, "I'm not going to go to any more Native plays. I'm tired of being depressed." I started to hear that more and more frequently. The other example of that was the fact that the dominant metaphor coming through in Native theatre at that time was rape. If you look at almost all the plays from about 1986 to 1996, almost every Native play has a rape in it. Rez Sisters, Dry Lips, Jessica, Moon Lodge, Trickster, Fireweed. All these different plays – Trickster had five rapes in it. It just became the dominant metaphor for Native theatre. When you deconstruct it, it becomes very obvious. You look at most Native cultures that had a very strong female presence or role in the culture, and then you have the introduction of what's often been called the patriarchal church and European government. The best metaphor for what happened to Native culture is rape. So it became an overwhelming metaphor for Native culture in theatre. After a while it gets kind of tiring. There are so many other metaphors we can deal with. An actress friend of mine, I saw her once after she'd done her show. She was very tired and down. I asked, "What's wrong?" She said, "Oh sometimes it's tiring being raped eight times a week, twice on Wednesdays." I was listening to her and its like, "Ya, that's what was happening."

I did a play once called Someday, which is about the scoop-up, when Native kids were taken away for adoption. It's about friends of the daughter they lost 25 years ago who is coming home. It deals with the family and their reaction. In the second half, the daughter comes back from Toronto and she arrives in a Saab, wearing a beautiful white fur coat, and is a successful lawyer in Toronto. That play was done in '91. A whole bunch of people saw it. It was a very popular play. I began getting a whole whack of calls from Native actresses saying, "If that play is ever remounted, call me, I want to do Janice Grace." That's the name of the adoptee. I couldn't understand that. I got eight or nine calls from actresses. They all wanted to do the adoptee. I couldn't really figure that out, because there are three female roles in it. I thought all of them were really interesting and exciting. And Janice is only in the second half. I was curious so I decided to ask these actresses. Well, it turns out that what's available for Native actresses out there is basically three roles. You're the mother in jeans and plaid shirt, that's unemployed with six kids. You're an alcoholic or you like to play Bingo. Or you're the victim of some sort of physical or sexual abuse. Those basic three characters were all that was being pumped out in Native theatre. Here comes the character of Janice, driving a Saab, wearing a white fur coat, and being a successful lawyer. All these women wanted to wear a white fur coat. They were tired of wearing makeup to imitate a black eye. So it's one of the reasons I decided to get into comedy, started writing humor.

I still write drama, and like you've heard me saying, it has a very important place, and I'm not denigrating it. But theatre represents the entire culture. It represents all the different facets. I thought it was too heavy, on the darker side. So during a conversation with a man who I refer to as my mentor, Larry Lewis (he'd just come from directing Dry Lips, which is a very serious and dark play). He said, "Drew, I think Native theatre has gotten too serious. I think we should do a play that doesn't have people drying their eyes from crying too much, or scratching their head from thinking too much. I think we should do something that has people holding their stomachs because they've been laughing too much." So just on a lark, we decided to do a play that was just a sheer celebration of Aboriginal humor, absolutely no social redeeming qualities whatsoever. We didn't know how successful it would be, we thought it would die, this play here, The Bootlegger Blues. To top it all off, we started rehearsing it in July 1990. Anybody remember what else was happening the summer of '90? Oka! So during the day we're off rehearsing this comedy, come at night, turn on the news, and we see all this stuff happening in Quebec. We're thinking, either this is the best time or the worst time to do Native comedy. As luck would have it, it went over very well. I consider the best review I got was from this old man after seeing the performance of it in Ottawa. He'd just walked out. He was an elder. He walked over and shook my hand. He said, "Your play made me homesick." Then he just turned and walked away. I have no idea who he was. But I thought, wow, maybe we are doing something interesting here. And we had fun doing it. Are there any comments or questions out there?

Question from the Audience: Your comments about why Native playwrights are writing plays all makes sense. My area of study is the contemporary Native novel. I was curious as to your take on native writers. There is a production of novels that is going on, why are you not attracted to it? Why are some choosing the novel as the genre to write in, rather than some other form?

Taylor: Very intelligent question. If you notice again, going back to what I refer to as the contemporary Aboriginal film/theatre renaissance, almost all the early Native playwrights were male, and almost all the early novelists were female. Lee Maracle, Jeanette Armstrong, Maria Campbell – almost all the early novelists were primarily female. All the early writers, Tomson Highway, Daniel David Moses, me, were male. I don't know why that is, but I just find that interesting. My answer for that, and it's not a solid or correct one, is you'll notice most of the people who wrote the novels were highly educated. Lee Miracle and Jeanette Armstrong have spent a lot of time in university or teaching university. All except for Tomson, who has two degrees, and Daniel David Moses, who has a Masters, I think most of us came to theatre because we speak with the right dialect, that's why I started out in television and came to theatre. When you're doing dialogue, you don't have to have perfect grammar, you don't have to have syntax correction. You don't have to understand the breakdown of sentence, paragraph, chapter, etc. It's just how people talk. Because we have an oral history, we can copy the language much better in terms of writing it up for theatre. That's why some people went to theatre. Most of your novelists, and there are more people now writing novels and short stories, are because our population is getting much better educated and can tackle a full length novel. It's terrifying to me. I have one in my head called, Motorcycles and Sweetgrass. It's next on my list to tackle. But I'm somewhat terrified of it, because my grammar is not great. I've been writing for 15 years and I've had a column, and I've got a lot of books out. It's taken me, through practice not education, how to learn how to string paragraphs together in a cohesive manner. I think that is the difference. More educated people learn novels. Now that the Native population is getting more education, there are more novelists. Does that make sense?

As I said, it doesn't answer all the questions, but I think it answers some. During the writers’ festival for developing new plays for Native Earth, two thirds of the writers who would come in with a play had no strong school background. They had a story they wanted to tell, and the theatrical process spoke to them much more than prose did. For me too, it's also the fun of working with a live audience. Making them laugh, making them cry. It's a wonderful rush.

Comment from the Audience: Certainly writing a novel is a long, isolated process.

Taylor: No kidding. I've actually applied for a grant from the Ontario Arts Council to go off somewhere for two months and hide myself in the bush and just focus on it. Just purge myself of it. When I get the money, I can afford to go away for two months. Being a freelance writer, I don't have the luxury of doing it otherwise.

Question from Audience: I'm curious in connection with the discussion of who's who in theatre and who's writing a novel, I have the impression that 10 years ago in Canada there was more vigor in Native theatre in Canada than the States in comparison. Is that wrong? What might be the reasons?

Taylor: Canada is 10 or 15 years ahead of where things are in the States. I've been doing a lot of work in the States. They produced a play of mine, The Bootlegger Blues, in L.A. In March and I went down there. There's a theatre company called Native Voices, that has been struggling to get Native theatre more well known in the States. They're working with, of all things, The Gene Autry Heritage Museum. That's their venue. When doing one of their readings there, the museum took a poll of their audience members. Prior to the introduction of Aboriginal casinos, which has only been within the last 10 or 15 years, most Californians didn't know there were still Native people alive in the States. A lot of Americans think Indians are dead. If you watch pop culture – Simpsons, West Wing, the only representation of Native people in television is in casinos. It's become the new stereotype. We're no longer alcoholics, we now all own casinos. I would watch television and I swear to god, every time a Native person appears on the screen in the States on mainstream American television, it's in reference to a casino. Up here, I think we're much more entrenched in the media, than down there. We have our own cable television show up here. There’s half a dozen Native theatre companies. We have our own magazines up here. We're just much more media literate up here than they are down in the States, and we use the media for our own advantages.

Perhaps I should do a reading now. What a novel concept, eh? . . . I write three types of plays. I write dramas, which as the name suggests, deal with issues. I've written two plays, Someday and Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth, both of which deal with Native adoption - the scoop-up. I've written a play called alterNatives, which is interesting. You should get a hold of that. It's a dinner party. It takes place between a young Native writer and an older non-native professor of Native lit. She wants him to write the great Canadian Aboriginal novel, and he wants to write science fiction. They have a dinner party. She invites her two best friends, to introduce him to them. They show up, and they're politically correct, white vegetarians. She takes the liberty of inviting these two former best friends, who are self-described alternative warriors. It becomes a very fun thing. It starts off fun, but there are issues in it. Let me put it this way. It was produced in Vancouver about three years ago. I got a call one day from the artistic director and she said, "Did you hear what happened last night?" I said, "No, what?" She said: "Somebody phoned in and said, if this theatre company continues to produce plays that are racist against white people, don't be surprised what people leave behind." There was a bomb threat. Somebody had seen my play and felt that it was racist against white people, and said they had left a bomb. Hence, the performance brought in the dogs, went through the place, and didn't find anything. But I was actually amazed. When she said they got a bomb threat, my reaction was, that is so cool. Can I put that on my resume? I was just amazed that it got such a visceral reaction. So yes, it deals with serious issues.

Up here in Canada, my dramas are much more in vogue. But down in the States they love my comedies better. I find that an interesting dichotomy. It may have something to do with the fact that most Canadians view Native people as tragic, so they like the dramas of oppressed Native people, whereas in the States, maybe they see us as the fun-loving casino owners. I'll read from … The Bootlegger Blues, my first comedy. It's about a 58-year-old good Christian Ojibwa woman who, through a series of circumstances, finds herself in possession of 143 cases of beer that she has to bootleg to buy an organ for the church. It's based on a true story. This one was fun to do, for a number of reasons. First of all, it's just fun to do a comedy. It's really interesting. You do a drama, and there's a lot of satisfaction if you can come up with doing a drama. The best thing I can say is it's like having a good hearty, healthy meal. You do something that has resonance, you see the audience and the audience keeps on thinking, sometimes they're laughing. There's a lot of humor in my dramas. I come out from Someday or Only Drunks and you get this good healthy warm glow when you do a drama. But when you do a comedy, it's so much fun. It's like tackling a bag of chips with dip. There's no nutrition in it, but sometimes you just want an ice cream cone or you want to go get french fries. It's just so much fun. It's comfort food.

Back to this play. Martha is the woman who's trying to raise the money. She has two kids. One of them is Andrew…He's been away at college for him to be a cop. He comes home after six months, goes to a powwow and he sees a young beautiful Native woman who has just moved back to the reserve. Their eyes connect, they immediately fall in love, hormones start pumping. They develop that bond that only 23 year olds can connect instantly. They fall in love instantly. They spent the day together and they're going to get together that night for a date. So that's the setting. So Martha walks into the kitchen in her house:

Excerpt from The Bootlegger Blues…

That'll teach me, yep it surely will. Never again will I use the devil's tools to profit the Lord. I'll even give up Bingo.

Andrew walks into the room: Put something on the stove mom, I'm hungry enough to eat a Mohawk, funny haircut and all.

Martha: Oh behave, you. I brought some food home from the center. Sit down and fix yourself something.

Andrew: Thanks mom, I've worked up quite the appetite.

Martha: Doing what?

Andrew: Walking with Angie, Angie White.

Martha: That's nice. Cousins should get to know each other.

Andrew: Cousins? We're cousins?

Martha: Uh huh.

Andrew: You sure?

Martha: Oh yes. You see, my uncle on my mother's side, he's been married to a certain Wilhimena George before she went crazy trying to eat her cat. They had a child, I think his name is Celestin, and is well known for his fondness for the ladies and he ended up fathering a child out of wedlock with a lady named Clyde.

Andrew: Clyde?!

Martha: Her father had a peculiar sense of humor. Anyways, they didn’t last long and if I remember correctly, Angie had a great cousin, I think on her father's side, named Ben, but everybody called him Boney, because the man was a living rack of bones. You could play ‘Amazing Grace’ on his ribs. Now come to think of it, Bony was also related to Angie's mother, twice removed from her grandfather's cousin. So these two met, Boney and Clyde, and god forbid if they didn't raise a whole batch of kids, one of whom was James.

Andrew: What a minute, that was Angie's father?

Martha: He was no relation. Pay attention, Blue. He was taken in by Boney and Clyde cause his family couldn't take care of him. This was your father's cousin. So James ended up staying with Boney and Clyde and eventually fell in love with Maggie and married her. Maggie is the aunt of Angie. See? Simple.

Andrew: We got any Tylenol?

Martha: Bathroom, top shelf in the mirror.

Andrew: Cousins.

Martha: Of course that's just a short version of the story.

Andrew: Oh well, it's back to the magazines.

Martha: Pardon?

Andrew: Nothing. Just a dream going up in smoke.

Martha: That's nice, dear.

The funny thing about this play, this was my third play. This was my first comedy, my first adult play, and my first two-act play. And it's the first one that we work shopped in front of a live audience. I did a reading. I went into it and I was actually terrified. It was my first instance of learning how you can have an instantaneous connection with the audience through your characters, and not be aware of it. Marianne is Martha's other child. She's 34, works at the band office, and is married to an Indian Yuppie. They're having a fight and are in the process of breaking up. Marianne and David have a fight. Martha walks in, in the middle of it, and David storms out. Martha says, what in god's green earth is the matter with you two?

Marianne: It's David. He's going through one of his jerk phases. It happens with men. Women have periods, men have jerk phases.

During that reading, I swear, all the women stood up and cheered. I'm sitting there in the corner, it's a comedy. I had a beer, and I'd take one drink for every time they laughed and two when they didn't laugh. I'm terrified. I see these women going yah, yah, and I'd stick my head up and go, what? But the real funny part was watching the men sitting beside women. They'd be going, it wasn't that funny. The second joke was in the second half when Martha has broken up, Marianne and is all depressed. She's having coffee with Angie. They're both disappointed.

Angie says to Marianne: Marianne, I have a problem.

Marianne looks at her and says: Angie, you're 22, single and fit. Unless you have something terminal, I don't want to hear about.

Again all the women sit up and yah, right on, you tell them. I was completely surprised at the response to those lines. As a writer, you're so in the process of doing it, and you're just trying to be true to the characters. What was really fundamental to me working on this comedy, not only do you have to come up with six separate characters with their own personalities, you have to come up with six different senses of humor, which is so fine tuning. I was surprised at the instantaneous response from the audience.

I guess we're running out of time – I should do another reading. I'll read one of my articles. I'll read you an academic type of thing. Several years ago I wrote an essay, I wrote about others. I wrote a review of the Disney film Pocahontas. It was in the Toronto Star. It's one of my favorite things to read, because it always gets a wonderful response.

It's called Pocahontas: Beauty and the Belief

[Reads] “I must and will confess. I saw the Disney film Pocahontas. I was curious to see how the Land of Mickey would treat this all-American Native legend. Briefly: the music was naturally marketable. The animation was fabulous. The animals of the forest were predictably cute, though subconsciously you couldn't help thinking that Pocahontas's people made a regular habit of eating Bambi and Thumper. It sort of confirmed that old adage, ‘never let facts get in the way of a good story.’ When John Smith first gets a good look at her standing in the mist of a waterfall, her long black hair flowing in the wind (I want to know what kind of conditioner she uses) and her little off the shoulder dress, hugging her body tightly, which is noticeably more curvaceous than Snow White (only goes to show you what a steady diet of Bambi and Thumper will do for you). I can't help but being a little uncomfortable knowing that the real Pocahontas wasn't much older than 11 or 12 years when the whole thing came down with the colonists.

Evidently, according to some historical reports, she also amused the Englishmen by doing nude cartwheels in the colony. From what I understand, there may even be some doubt as to whether John Smith and Pocahontas ever really met, let alone had any serious romantic relationship. But other than that, it was a good movie. The whole Pocahontas legend can be looked at from several different levels. First of all, it became the stuff great romances were made of. Check out any bookstore that has a sizeable stock of historical romances. Count how many of them involve a forbidden romance between a Native person and a white person, and the fiery savage passions that smolders and threatens to break free from beneath the taut leather. You get the picture.

When you look at the story objectively, it's about a romance between at best a 12 year old Indian girl and a 30 year old sailor, who was captured by Pochahontas' father. According to Smith and only Smith's word, Pocahontas laid her head on his, openly defying her father, the Chief of the Tribe, as Smith’s head was about to be clubbed and crushed.

To quote the native actress and playwright Monique Mojica’s play, Princess Pochahontas and the Blue spots, 'where was the girl’s mother?' To the best of my knowledge, this is not the type of behavior most mothers would condone in a 12 year old.

In the movie, her mother is dead. But as we've already seen, this movie is not big on historical accuracy. If Pocahontas's mother had been around, no doubt she would've warned her against falling for someone who says his name is John Smith. How many women have heard that before? …..Both legend and Disney portray Smith as a handsome, strapping, blonde haired, blue eyed man. This would explain why Pocahontas would fall for him, according to the theory of a Mohawk friend of mine. Over the years, he as come to believe that, for some reason, most Natives are attracted to shiny objects and like to collect them. This includes turquoise, silver, and blondes. That's something for a sociologist or anthropologist to ponder. When alls said and done, Pocahontas, whose real name was Matoaka (Pocahontas was a nickname her father called her, meaning ‘playful one’ ) will make Disney a lot of wampum (which is not actually a form of aboriginal currency). At Xmas (and it's an accepted fact that Christ was not born on December 25^th) kids all over North America get a little American Indian princess doll, no doubt made somewhere in Asia, sometimes you just don't know what to believe.

One final note, Pocahontas later converted to Christianity, married a colonist named John Rolfe, went to England, saw the original production of The Tempest just a few weeks after the author died, and was consumed by smallpox at the age of 22.

I find that interesting. She actually saw the original production of The Tempest. I told this to a friend of mine and another academic. They had trouble putting the two timelines together and imagining that. Just an example of some of the articles I write. I'm a firm believer that reality is a far funnier writer than I am. When I write my articles and essays, I don't actually write jokes. I just repeat what reality has offered to me. One of the few talents I have in this world is the ability to pay attention to the world and store up idiosyncrasies that come out and that I can use. Yesterday I was a reading at the University of Alberta. There was a little flyer out in front that was an invitation to a barbeque. I looked at it, and it was University of Alberta School of Veterinary Medicine, hosting the barbeque. What's wrong with that picture? I store that stuff away, because reality is so much fun.

It's 2:30, should I go on longer? I don't know if anybody has a life. Okay I'll go on for another 10 minutes before you're all excused. I'll give you two of the best examples I found of humor. I actually found the actual physical line that separates Native people and white people. I can't think of a better example. Last year a very lovely woman invited me to go whitewater canoeing and sea kayaking. I'm a very sane person, and I like to think a very talented person. What would make a person like me want to go and do something suicidal like that? She was very pretty. So when she asked me I said, "okay let's go." So we did. I'm sitting on this canoe, heading for rapids, and I thought, this is insane. Picture a river. On this river are two canoes. In one canoe is a group of white people. In the other canoe is a group of Native people. What do the white people do? They start paddling as fast as they can to ford the sharp rocks and white waters. What do the Native people do? They go for pizza. Instead of going down that river, I'm thinking, I don't think this is what our ancestors built this canoe for. My ancestors are rolling over in their graves, but my white half is going, "go for it, go for it." I'm looking around at these six people on this canoe trip, and they're all white. A couple weeks later I go on this sea kayaking trip, 16 people, they're all white. They're out in these kayaks, Inuit plastic kayaks, paddling away. And a storm is coming up and the waves are four feet. I'm thinking, this is insane, when does this become fun? The kayakers had these special type of gloves that they wear to prevent calluses. The gloves are called "nootkas." Now to the best of my knowledge, the real Nootka is a West Coast First Nation that neither kayaked nor wore gloves. I'm thinking, this is recreational cultural appropriation. Are the Inuit getting royalties for these canoes? I should be getting royalties for the bastardized using of those canoes. Or I'd be happy if somebody would just take me to lunch. But I found that such a wonderful indication of the difference between Native people and white people.

I also found a physical line of humor between white women and Native women. This actually happened at the University of Alberta. It was really weird. A friend of mine who goes to U of A told me that there's a new native organization that helps the wounded student body – native men in pain on campus. I wrote an article about this, it was out a few months ago. It's a new means of organization. It's an organization called SAW, Survivors of Aboriginal Women. It's a broken hearts club for Native men. It's only a matter of time before somebody sets up a SAM, Survivors of Aboriginal Men. But on my lecture tours when I've done this, I told this joke to a group of Native women and they burst out laughing. I've had several say, “Wow, what?” I tell this to a group of white women, and there's silence. One woman said after, ‘Oh yeah, tell that joke in a women's shelter.’ Statistically, more women are battered by men than the other way around. They don't perceive the humor of the situation. They take it to a realistic level in a way that the joke is not meant. It's not about abuse, it's about broken hearts. I think that's something common to both sexes. I just found it so odd that there'd be two different reactions to the same joke, for women.

The first essay in here (Funny, You Don’t Look Like One) is, Pretty like a white boy: observations of a blue-eyed Ojibwa. It was one of the first essays I ever wrote, and it's been anthologized to death. It's in half a dozen books. I was angry at one point, but I've gotten it out. There's a wonderful Cree poet named Louise Half. She came to me once. We were talking and she said, "my grandson is half or quarter Cree, but they raised him Cree, but he's blonde. He goes to a school that's 75% Cree, and he gets teased all the time. He's having identity problems, getting teased. Do you have any words of wisdom I can pass on to him, showing that there's light at the end of the tunnel?" I said, "Yes, take him aside, show him my books, and tell him I have made a fortune off it." Just be pragmatic. That's one of the things I find.

Everybody, no matter who they are or how entrenched in the culture they are, go through an identity problem in their teen years. I just turn that angst into humor. Enough that three of these books are out, the other two are here. I'm still writing about it. Not as much anymore, but I find it odd that it's still a common issue and I still have to deal with it. Not because I want to deal with it, but other people still have to deal with it. Lawrence has an essay out, which she interviewed me for, as well as a bunch of other people. In it she did something where she says, at some point, fair skinned Indians are going to have to acknowledge the fact that they've had a better life than full blooded Native people. My jaw dropped. I could not believe that she knows my entire life. She could automatically say my life is so much easier than anybody else's. I've had a whole different set of problems to deal with, based on the way I look. So I had to write an article about that. I'm still dealing with issues.

At Amazon.com where they're selling these books a reader can write a six-line review for the website. Somebody wrote in a review for one of these books, saying “He grew up in Toronto and his mother was a Bill C31 woman. Don't believe anything he writes.”

My jaw dropped. I didn't go to Toronto till I was 9, and that was to go to the Metro Zoo. My mother's not Bill C31. But Amazon.com is American, and obviously this person who wrote the review is Canadian, because they knew Bill C31 and they used the term 'reserve' not 'reservation.' People still don't believe me when I say I'm Native. It's a constant battle. But the best word of advice I got came from a Maori woman. Somebody once asked her, (she's half Maori or whatever) "How much Maori blood do you have?" And she said, "Just as much blood as any other Maori woman." That's the best way to deal with it. Just struggle on. There's always going to be dissenters. So what? Let them deal with their own eggs.

Alright boys and girls, thank you very much, carry on with your lives.

Awards

Awards include: James Buller Award for Someday Chalmers Canadian Play Award for Best Play for Young Audiences for Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock/Education is our Right, Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Best Drama for The Bootlegger Blues, and its sequels, The Baby Blues (which won first prize at the University of Alaska Anchorage Native Playwriting Contest), and The Buz’Gem Blues (which recently ran in Los Angeles). Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth won the 1996 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play. The Girl Who Loved Horses was nominated for another Chalmers Award. Drew's play, In a World Created by a Drunken God was recently nominated for the 2005 Siminovitch Prize in Theatre award.

Accomplishments

Theatre by Drew Hayden Taylor

Publications by Drew Hayden Taylor

Introduction by Dave Brundage, on behalf of CWIKR

Awards

Accomplishments

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