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Review
I can never see or read a play by Canadian Cree dramatist Tomson Highway without thinking of the Russian master Nikolai Gogol. Not the Gogol of The Inspector General and “The Overcoat”, necessarily, but the one who penned inimitable folk tales like “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”-simultaneously one of the funniest and one of the saddest stories ever written. Like Gogol, Highway creates broad comic characters with super-sized personalities, and his writing is just as likely to begin with a belly laugh and end with a sob.
Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, originally produced in 2004 by the Western Canada Theatre of Kamloops, B.C., is a historical play about the grievances of the indigenous people of the Thompson River Valley, as laid out in a deposition presented by their chiefs to Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910. Nothing funny about that, and yet Highway’s tone, right up until the end, is frequently hilarious. He approaches the subject via four First Nations women of various ages who are preparing the banquet to accompany the “Great Big Kahoona’s” (Laurier’s) visit to Kamloops-a quartet of bickering, bantering females who might well be ancestors to the characters of Highway’s landmark play The Rez Sisters. And he gives the story a fresh, contemporary feel by rendering the women’s Shuswap dialogue in a colloquial, often anachronistic modern English that can be by turns garrulous, eloquent, or playfully ribald (much is made of the Big Kahoona being served a flesh-and-fowl dinner of “beaver and tits”).
Highway uses comedy as leavening for this sadly familiar tale of stolen land, with the steady encroachment of English settlers upon rivers, pastures and mountains becoming almost a running gag. In the end, however, tragedy wins out: revelations of racial hatred and violence surface; the youngest of the women, mentally unstable, seeks to abort the half-white child she is carrying; and the recited text of the chiefs’ litany of grievances, the Laurier Memorial, begins to supplant the boisterous mood. Still, the play closes on a defiant note-with a sense of aboriginal resilience and endurance, due no doubt in part to that ability to laugh in the face of woe.
Martin Morrow (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
"The play is both laugh-out-loud funny and a precarious high-wire act … A flawless production … ” -- Globe & Mail
Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout, originally produced in 2004 by the Western Canada Theatre of Kamloops, B.C., is a historical play about the grievances of the indigenous people of the Thompson River Valley, as laid out in a deposition presented by their chiefs to Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1910. Nothing funny about that, and yet Highway’s tone, right up until the end, is frequently hilarious. He approaches the subject via four First Nations women of various ages who are preparing the banquet to accompany the “Great Big Kahoona’s” (Laurier’s) visit to Kamloops-a quartet of bickering, bantering females who might well be ancestors to the characters of Highway’s landmark play The Rez Sisters. And he gives the story a fresh, contemporary feel by rendering the women’s Shuswap dialogue in a colloquial, often anachronistic modern English that can be by turns garrulous, eloquent, or playfully ribald (much is made of the Big Kahoona being served a flesh-and-fowl dinner of “beaver and tits”).
Highway uses comedy as leavening for this sadly familiar tale of stolen land, with the steady encroachment of English settlers upon rivers, pastures and mountains becoming almost a running gag. In the end, however, tragedy wins out: revelations of racial hatred and violence surface; the youngest of the women, mentally unstable, seeks to abort the half-white child she is carrying; and the recited text of the chiefs’ litany of grievances, the Laurier Memorial, begins to supplant the boisterous mood. Still, the play closes on a defiant note-with a sense of aboriginal resilience and endurance, due no doubt in part to that ability to laugh in the face of woe.
Martin Morrow (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
"The play is both laugh-out-loud funny and a precarious high-wire act … A flawless production … ” -- Globe & Mail
Book Description
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.<br /><br />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.
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