Toronto at Dreamer's Rock and Education Is Our Right

Hugh Oliver is Editor-in-Chief, OISE Press.

Taylor is an Ojibway from Ontario’s Curve Lake Reserve and a protégé
of the very successful aboriginal dramatist Tomson Highway. I suppose it
is pretty well inevitable that an aboriginal currently writing plays
would focus on whites’ destruction of his culture and unfair treatment
of his peoples. But because of this, didacticism tends to become more
important than character and thereby diminishes the dramatic values.

Both plays have fanciful themes. In Dreamer’s Rock (an outcrop on
Manitoulin Island), a 16-year-old aboriginal boy, Rusty, is confronted
by a boy from 400 years ago (shortly before Cartier’s arrival) and by
another boy from 100 years into the future. Their discussion emphasizes
the contemporary problem facing an aboriginal youth: being torn between
his cultural past and the currents of modern society that hasten him
toward the future. It is one thing to read a play and another to
transport it imaginatively into the theatre, but I would think that on
stage this piece might come across as rather static.

Education Is Our Right takes its theme from Dickens’s A Christmas
Carol, with Ebenezer Cadieux, Minister of Indian Affairs, in the role of
Scrooge. The plot centres on the Minister’s Act to restrict the
aboriginals’ rights to postsecondary education. The Minister is
visited in turn by the ghosts of Education Past, Education Present, and
Education Future, and in a series of brief vignettes, it is demonstrated
to him how misguided are Ottawa’s policies for aboriginals. Although
the Minister is seemingly won over, the change is transient, and (unlike
Scrooge) he soon reverts to political type. Given a choice between
seeing the two plays, I would opt for this one. The drama is more
persuasive.