The Buz' Gem Blues, The,

Ian C. Nelson is librarian emeritus and former assistant director of
libraries at the University of Saskatchewan Library. He is also
dramaturge for the Festival de la Dramaturgie des Prairies.

“What do Klingons, your father, my mother, and a Mohawk cook have to
do with […] reassessing your life?” Canada’s leading Native
dramatist lets loose a white anthropologist at an Aboriginal Elders’
conference to analyze the sexual habits of contemporary First Nations
people. The subtitle of his study?: “The Natives are Restless.”

With this opening, The Buz’ Gem Blues—justly billed as zany,
outrageous, and farcical— throws the bannock on the grill. Familiar
figures from The Baby Blues—the Mohawk Elder Amos and his young filly
Summer (aka Agnes Ducharme, wearing enough Native jewelry for a Broadway
musical to accentuate her 1/64th Indian DNA)—encounter the Christian
Ojibway Elder, Martha Kakina, and her recently divorced daughter,
Marianne from The Bootleg Blues. Joining them are a Cree neek (i.e.,
Native geek), who calls himself The Warrior Who Never Sleeps, and the
white anthropologist, who loses himself in jargon and relates
exclusively to his housecat, Beowolf, when he ought to be out looking
for “horny Indians to talk to.”

The resulting repartee is infectious, and the trials of catering this
conference are hilarious. The humor has the expected cast of gentle,
Native self-deprecation (in both senses of the word), but it does not
lack in zingers that give one pause. For instance, in a completely
natural context for the play, The Warrior Who Never Sleeps combats his
geekiness by dressing resplendently in a Mountie jacket “as a symbol
to show our oppressors that I am not frightened of them.” Later Martha
questions his probity with a pointed double entendre: “I’m an old
lady and I don’t want the last thing I hear on this Earth to be lies
coming from a man in a Mountie jacket.” Hayden Taylor (winner of a
Chalmers Award in 1992) even makes a foray into Monty Python territory
with an ingenious, Indigenous take on Spam.