Someday

David E. Kemp is chair of the Drama Department at Queen’s University
and author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Drew Hayden Taylor, an Ojibway from the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario,
is one of Canada’s leading Native dramatists. His last play, The
Bootlegger Blues, won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama,
while Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock won the prestigious Chalmers Award in
1992.

In the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of Native children were removed from
their families and placed in what were presumably considered to be more
“suitable” foster homes. Native people refer to this enforced
displacement as the “scoop-up.” Set in a fictional Ojibway community
(the setting could, in fact, be any Native reserve in Canada), Someday
tells the story of Anne Wabung, whose daughter was taken away by
children’s-aid workers when the girl was only a toddler.

As the play opens, it is Christmas time, 35 years after Anne’s
daughter was “scooped up”; her yearning to see her now-grown
daughter is as strong as ever. When Anne gets a message from the band
office that her long-lost daughter is coming to visit, her dreams and
expectations run riot, but things do not work out as either she or her
daughter had planned. Someday is entertaining, humorous, and
high-spirited; it also packs a considerable emotional punch.