The Boy in the Treehouse, and Girl Who Loved Her Horses

David E. Kemp, a former professor of drama at Queen’s University, is
the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

The two fine plays in this volume are both coming-of-age stories that
deal in a comic and bittersweet way with the conflicts between and among
Native and colonial cultures in North America.

In The Boy in the Treehouse, Simon, the son of a British father and an
Ojibway mother, decides to reclaim the Native part of his heritage as a
rite of passage into manhood. To do this, he settles into his treehouse
to pursue a “vision quest.” The vision fails to come, however, when
neighborhood activities keep distracting him.

The Girl Who Loved Her Horses is about a strange, young girl living
outside the reserve who has a remarkable talent for drawing horses. One
day, a huge image of her horse appears on the wall of an building.
Instead of evoking high spiritedness and freedom, however, the horse
glares with passion and defiance. The young girl has clearly been forced
to grow up.

The plays address such issues and experiences as what it means to be of
mixed parentage, how to deal with the death of a parent, and the
importance of memory. Although both plays deal with young Native people
and take place in a Native milieu (one on a reserve, the other in an
urban environment), the power of the writing and the strength of the
author’s vision gives them a universality that should guarantee them a
wide audience.

Drew Hayden Taylor, an Ojibway from the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario,
is a multi-award-winning playwright. His other recent works include The
Baby Blues (1999) and alterNatives (2000).